PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Nobel Prize - Physics
German-American physicist
Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein...
German physicist and philosopher
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist and philosopher who discovered (1925) a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics...
Danish physicist
Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who is generally regarded as one of the foremost physicists of the 20th century. He was the first to apply the quantum concept, which restricts the energy of a system...
German physicist
Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests...
Italian-American physicist
Enrico Fermi was an Italian-born American scientist who became one of the chief architects of the nuclear age. He developed the mathematical statistics required to clarify a large class of subatomic phenomena,...
Italian physicist
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian physicist and inventor of a successful wireless telegraph, or radio (1896). In 1909 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he shared with German physicist Ferdinand...
English physicist
P.A.M. Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Dirac is most famous for his 1928 relativistic quantum theory of the electron...
British physicist
J.J. Thomson was an English physicist who helped revolutionize the knowledge of atomic structure by his discovery of the electron (1897). He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906 and was knighted...
American physicist
Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era. Feynman remade quantum...
Polish-born French physicist
Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903...
Russian physicist
Lev Davidovich Landau was a Soviet theoretical physicist, one of the founders of the quantum theory of condensed matter whose pioneering research in this field was recognized with the 1962 Nobel Prize...
American physicist
Wolfgang Pauli was an Austrian-born physicist and recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery in 1925 of the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that in an atom no two electrons...
French physicist
Henri Becquerel was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity through his investigations of uranium and other substances. In 1903 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie....
French physicist
Louis de Broglie was a French physicist best known for his research on quantum theory and for predicting the wave nature of electrons. He was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physics. De Broglie was the...
German-born American physicist
A.A. Michelson was a German-born American physicist who established the speed of light as a fundamental constant and pursued other spectroscopic and metrological investigations. He received the 1907 Nobel...
British scientist
Lord Rayleigh was an English physical scientist who made fundamental discoveries in the fields of acoustics and optics that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He received the Nobel...
Austrian physicist
Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with British...
American physicist
Rainer Weiss is a German-born American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and for the first direct...
French physicist
Alain Aspect is a French physicist who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with quantum entanglement. He shared the prize with American physicist John F. Clauser and Austrian...
British physicist
Sir Lawrence Bragg was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of the Bragg law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure....
Soviet physicist
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was a Soviet physicist who invented new machines for the liquefaction of gases and in 1937 discovered the superfluidity of liquid helium. He was a corecipient of the 1978 Nobel...
British physicist
Sir William Bragg was a pioneer British scientist in solid-state physics who was a joint winner (with his son Sir Lawrence Bragg) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for his research on the determination...
French chemist
Pierre Curie was a French physical chemist, cowinner with his wife Marie Curie of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. He and Marie discovered radium and polonium in their investigation of radioactivity....
German physicist
Max Born was a German physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 with Walther Bothe for his probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Born came from an upper-middle-class, assimilated,...
Austrian quantum physicist
Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian physicist who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with quantum entanglement. He shared the prize with American physicist John F. Clauser and...
American physicist
John F. Clauser is an American physicist who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with quantum entanglement. He shared the prize with French physicist Alain Aspect and Austrian...
American physicist
Chen Ning Yang is a Chinese-born American theoretical physicist whose research with Tsung-Dao Lee showed that parity—the symmetry between physical phenomena occurring in right-handed and left-handed coordinate...
Indian physicist
C.V. Raman was an Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in India. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light traverses...
American physicist
John J. Hopfield is an American physicist who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with neural networks. He shared the prize with British-Canadian cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton....
American materials scientist
Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese-born American materials scientist who was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). He shared the prize with Japanese materials...
Japanese physicist
Kajita Takaaki is a Japanese physicist who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the oscillations of neutrinos from one flavour to another, which proved that those subatomic particles...
American physicist
Steven Chu is an American physicist who, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for their independent pioneering research in cooling and trapping...
German oceanographer
Klaus Hasselmann is a German oceanographer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2021 for the foundational progress he and Japanese-born American meteorologist Syukuro Manabe made in developing...
British physicist
James Chadwick was an English physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for the discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was educated at the University of Manchester, where he worked under Ernest...
American physicist
Percy Williams Bridgman was an American experimental physicist noted for his studies of materials at high temperatures and pressures. For his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1946. Bridgman...
Soviet physicist
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with Pavel A. Cherenkov and Ilya M. Frank for his efforts in explaining Cherenkov radiation. Tamm was one of the...
American physicist
Kip Thorne is an American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the first direct detection of gravity...
American physicist
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his work pertaining to the classification of subatomic particles and their interactions. At age 15 Gell-Mann...
Hungarian-born Austrian physicist
Ferenc Krausz is a Hungarian-born Austrian physicist who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments with attosecond pulses of light. He shared the prize with French physicists Pierre...
American meteorologist
Manabe Syukuro is a meteorologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2021 for the foundational progress he and German oceanographer Klaus Hasselmann made in modeling Earth’s climate, quantifying...
Japanese materials scientist
Akasaki Isamu was a Japanese materials scientist who was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics for inventing blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), paving the way for future innovation. He shared the prize...
American physicist
Robert Millikan was an American physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his study of the elementary electronic charge and the photoelectric effect. Millikan graduated from Oberlin...
French physicist
Pierre Agostini is a French physicist who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments with attosecond pulses of light. He shared the prize with French physicist Anne L’Huillier and...
Swiss astronomer
Didier Queloz is a Swiss astronomer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery with Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the first known extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star....
Swiss astronomer
Michel Mayor is a Swiss astronomer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery with Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz of the first known extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star....
Italian-born American physicist
Emilio Segrè was an Italian-born American physicist who, with Owen Chamberlain, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959 for the discovery of the antiproton, an antiparticle having the same mass as...
American physicist
Luis Alvarez was an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968 for work that included the discovery of many resonance particles (subatomic particles having extremely...
British physicist
Peter Higgs was a British physicist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics for proposing the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that is the carrier particle of a field that endows...
Canadian physicist
Arthur B. McDonald is a Canadian physicist who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the oscillations of neutrinos from one flavor (electron, muon, or tau) to another, which proved...
American astronomer
Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. is an American radio astronomer and physicist who, with Russell A. Hulse, was the corecipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery of the first binary pulsar....
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