List of physicists

Portrait source. Gottlieb Biermann; scanned by Michael Schönitzer in November 2008 from Die großen Deutschen im Bilde (1936). Public-domain artwork; faithful photographic reproduction, PD-Art / Public Domain Mark.

Portrait source. Julien Léopold Boilly; Wellcome Collection, image V0000147, library reference ICV No 329. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

A researcher credited with Electrostatics of Two Charged Conducting Spheres by John Lekner. The 2012 paper gives an affiliation at Victoria University of Wellington.

A physicist associated with spectrum analysis.

Verified external portrait reference: Portrait or portrait collection identifying the sitter.

A physicist associated with Ørsted's experiment.

A physicist associated with the astatic galvanometer.

A physicist associated with the Ehrenfest theorem and, with Tatyana Afanasyeva-Ehrenfest, the Ehrenfest model.

Physicist and computer scientist associated with the Karnaugh map for simplifying Boolean functions. Wikipedia biography identifies the subject and his logic-design contribution.

Author credited under these initials on the 1965 Monte Carlo method plasma paper Monte Carlo Calculations of the Radial Distribution Functions for a Proton-Electron Plasma by A. A. Barker. The initials are not expanded because an exact identity beyond the publication credit has not been established here. University of Adelaide thesis addendum identifying the 1965 publication.

Physicist and engineer whose work includes friction and strength of materials. His name appears in the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion.

Physicist and clinical radiobiology researcher whose work addressed fractionation in radiation therapy.^[ref]

Physicist at the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory whose work included proton therapy.^[ref]

His sustained frictional heating observations challenged a finite-store account of heat.

A physicist whose thermodynamics distinguished conservation of energy from restrictions on cyclic heat-to-work conversion.

Experimental physicist associated with detector development and biomedical applications at Jefferson Lab.

Physicist and coauthor of Impact of Population Growth by Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren.

Physicist whose Two New Sciences by Galileo Galilei develops mathematical accounts of motion.

Physicist and mathematician associated with the Atwood machine.

Homepage: galileo.phys.virginia.edu/~mf1i/home.html

A physicist and mathematician associated with Stokes flow, Stokes' second problem and Stokes theorem.

James Prescott Joule was an English physicist whose private experiments connected electricity, heat and mechanical work. His family ran a brewery in Salford; he developed an experimental laboratory while working in the family business.^[ref] The Royal Society's archive identifies his occupation as physicist and records his life as 1818–1889.^[ref]

His electrical heating experiments placed metal coils in water and measured the temperature change. Later, he used the brewery cellar to reduce ambient temperature fluctuations during friction experiments and took particular care over thermometer calibration.^[ref] These practical choices address a central difficulty of calorimetry: a small temperature rise can reflect both the intended input of energy and unwanted heat transfer to the surroundings. A quiet baseline and a known heat capacity are part of the measurement, not decoration around the formula.

The contrast between Joule heating and Joule's paddle-wheel experiment makes the connection especially clear. One supplies electrical work; the other supplies mechanical work. In each case, calorimetry tracks the resulting change of internal energy. Comparing quantitatively controlled inputs with thermal changes gives an experimental test of conservation of energy, rather than merely showing that stirring or an electric current can warm water. The paddle-wheel account describes the descending weights, vanes, thermal controls and corrections needed for that comparison.

Joule's free-expansion experiment asks a different question: how does a gas's temperature change during expansion without external work? The Joule-Thomson effect instead concerns flow through a restriction and a balance involving enthalpy. Keeping the two experiments distinct prevents a shared historical name from hiding different system boundaries and different conserved quantities.

A physicist appointed to Dresden in 1911 to establish an institute for electrical engineering.^[ref]

A physicist whose research includes acoustics.^[ref]

A physicist appointed to the Paris Observatory in 1855 who developed telescopes.^[ref]

A physicist whose appointments took him from Zürich in 1868 through Würzburg and Strasbourg to the Berlin chair of experimental physics in 1888.^[ref]

A physicist researching general relativity.^[ref]

A physicist researching general relativity.^[ref]

A physicist researching general relativity.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

A physicist working on electron diffraction.^[ref]

Physics and acoustics.^[ref]

Physics (also physical chemistry).^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

The Lorentz force connects charged-particle motion to the electric field and magnetic field. His theoretical account of the Zeeman effect connects that motion to changes in emitted light.

A physicist.^[ref]

The Thomson charge-to-mass experiment used electric and magnetic deflections of cathode rays to investigate their charged constituents. It determines a charge-to-mass ratio; separating electric charge from mass requires additional information.

A physicist.^[ref]

Wien's displacement law connects a thermal spectrum's peak position to temperature. Specifying whether the spectrum is expressed per unit wavelength or per unit frequency is essential to stating which peak is meant.

A physicist.^[ref]

The Van der Waals equation connects a dilute gas model to the possibility of a liquid-gas critical point. Its usefulness includes showing how attractions and excluded volume can change an equation of state; its simple constants do not make it an exact model for every fluid.

A physicist.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

Wireless telegraphy links the dynamics of a transmitter, propagation and the response of a receiver. A successful detector reading depends on that complete chain, rather than on the transmitter alone.

A physicist.^[ref]

Wireless telegraphy connects an oscillating electrical circuit to a distant receiver. Tuning and coupling determine how effectively the circuit transfers a signal.

A physicist whose work connects special relativity, general relativity, Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1933 until his death in 1955.^[ref]

In 1905, Albert Einstein used the photoelectric effect to explore quantized light, related Brownian motion to molecular agitation, formulated special relativity, and connected changes in mass and energy. These problems link visible measurements to otherwise inaccessible structure: emitted electron energies, suspended-particle displacements and comparisons of clocks.^[ref]

The Millikan photoelectric experiment follows one of those predictions into the laboratory. Its stopping-voltage measurements test a quantitative relation; the experiment's apparatus, surface preparation and electrical corrections matter to that inference. The Einstein field equations and general relativity lead to a different set of tests involving gravity and spacetime.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 recognized his theoretical work, particularly the law of the photoelectric effect; the award was presented in 1922.^[ref]

An experimental physicist known for measurements of electron charge and the photoelectric effect. The Millikan photoelectric experiment describes the apparatus and stopping-voltage measurements behind his 1916 test.^[ref]

A physicist who translated Heinrich Hertz's Electric Waves into English for the 1893 edition.^[ref]

Identity: Trinity College archive identifies the translator as Daniel Evan Jones

Homepage: www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/heinrich-hertz