Applied optics and instrumentation

Michael Ference Jr.

Michael Ference Jr. (born 1911) was an American experimental physicist who served as Chief Scientist at the U.S. Army's Evans Signal Laboratory from 1946 to 1953.

Oct 22, 2026

Mykola Pylchykov

Mykola Pylchykov (Микола Пильчиков, 1857–1908) was a Ukrainian experimental physicist known for the improved Pulyui X-ray tube and an 1898 public demonstration of radio control.

Otto Richard Lummer (1860–1925) was a German experimental physicist who, with Wien and Pringsheim at the Reichsanstalt in Berlin, verified the radiation laws and prompted Planck's 1900 quantum formula.

Paul Linford Richards

Paul Linford Richards (1934–2024) was an American experimental physicist at UC Berkeley who built sensitive far-infrared detectors and measured the cosmic microwave background, the Big Bang's leftover radiation.

Pieter Hendrik van Cittert

Pieter Hendrik van Cittert (died 1959) was a Dutch physicist at Utrecht University known for the van Cittert–Zernike theorem of radio interferometry and an iterative deconvolution method in image processing.

Robert W. Wood

Robert W. Wood was an American experimental physicist, professor at Johns Hopkins from 1901 to 1938, known for ultraviolet photography, resonance radiation, blazed diffraction gratings, and his 1904 debunking of N-rays.

Roger Angel

Roger Angel, born 1941, is an astronomer and optical scientist at the University of Arizona known for casting lightweight honeycomb mirrors for the world's largest telescopes.

Sigmund Strauss

Sigmund Strauss, also spelled Siegmund Strauß, was an Austrian physicist and radio engineer in Vienna, a pioneer of radio engineering who died in New York in 1942.

Thomas Ralph Merton

Thomas Ralph Merton (1888–1969) was an English physicist and inventor known for precision spectroscopy of gas spectra and for cheap, accurate methods of copying and ruling diffraction gratings.

Vernon Ellis Cosslett

Vernon Ellis Cosslett (1908–1990) was a British physicist who founded the Cavendish Laboratory's Electron Microscopy Section in 1946, developing the X-ray microscope and high-voltage electron microscopes.

William B. McLean

William B. McLean (1914–1976) was an American physicist and Navy civilian scientist who conceived and led development of the AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile at China Lake, later heading the Navy's undersea research organization.

William Duane (physicist)

William Duane (1872–1935) was an American physicist and biophysicist at Harvard, a pioneer of X-ray research in the United States known for the Duane–Hunt law.

WTP Optics

WTP Optics is the consulting firm of William T. Plummer, an American optical engineer who led optics at Polaroid and worked on the SX-70 camera.

Xiangli Chen

Xiangli Chen is an engineer and former General Electric vice president who led the GE China Technology Center and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.