Physicists and astronomers

Eric L. Shirley

Eric L. Shirley is an American theoretical physicist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, since 1994, who works on optical properties of solids and diffraction corrections in radiometry.

Eric M. Rogers

Eric M. Rogers (1902–1990) was a British-born physicist and Princeton professor known for his lecture demonstrations and the 1960 textbook Physics for the Inquiring Mind.

Eric Mazur is a Dutch-born physicist and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard, known for black silicon, femtosecond laser micromachining, and Peer Instruction, and served as President of Optica in 2017.

Eric Ogilvie Hall

Eric Ogilvie Hall was a physical metallurgist whose 1951 measurement of yield stress against grain size in steel is the first half of the Hall–Petch relation.

Eric Priest

Eric Priest (born 1943) is a British mathematician at the University of St Andrews known for pioneering the study of magnetic reconnection in solar flares.

Eric Stefan Garrido Shaqfeh

Eric Stefan Garrido Shaqfeh is an American chemical engineer at Stanford University who studies complex fluids, combining single-molecule DNA experiments with simulations of polymer, blood, and suspension flows.

Eric Tkaczyk

Eric Tkaczyk is a physician-scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Nashville VA who won the 2025 PECASE for optical skin disease diagnosis research.

Erich P. Ippen

Erich P. Ippen is an American physicist and electrical engineer at MIT, a founder of femtosecond optics who produced the first subpicosecond light pulses at Bell Laboratories in 1974.

Erich Regener

Erich Regener (1881–1955) was a German experimental physicist who measured the elementary charge and probed cosmic rays in deep lakes and the stratosphere, finding the atmosphere's ion-production maximum.

Erich Runge

Erich Runge is a German theoretical physicist and professor at TU Ilmenau, best known as co-author with Eberhard K. U. Gross of the 1984 paper founding time-dependent density-functional theory.

Erik Asphaug

Erik Asphaug is a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona who studies giant impacts and small bodies, co-authoring a 2001 Nature paper on the Moon's origin.

Erik Verlinde

Erik Verlinde, born 1962 in Woudenberg, Netherlands, is a Dutch theoretical physicist at the University of Amsterdam known for proposing that gravity is an emergent, entropic phenomenon.

Erika T. Hamden

Erika T. Hamden is an American astrophysicist who builds far-ultraviolet instruments to study the circumgalactic medium, leading the FIREBall-2 balloon telescope and proposed Eos and Hyperion missions.

Sep 20, 2026

Erio Tosatti

Erio Tosatti, born 1943, is an Italian condensed matter theorist who founded and led the condensed matter theory group at SISSA in Trieste and won the 2018 Enrico Fermi Prize.

Ernest Courant

Ernest Courant (1920–2020) was an American physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who co-invented strong focusing, the principle behind the LHC and nearly all modern particle accelerators.

Ernest Fox Nichols

Ernest Fox Nichols was an American experimental physicist who made the first precise measurement of the pressure of light at Dartmouth, and served as president of Dartmouth College and MIT.

Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1901–1958) was an American physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who invented the cyclotron and won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Ernest M. Henley

Ernest M. Henley (1924–2017) was a German-born American nuclear physicist at the University of Washington, known for studies of parity, isospin, and time-reversal symmetries of nuclear forces.

Ernest Ma

Ernest Ma is an American theoretical high-energy physicist, professor emeritus at UC Riverside, whose 1998 paper classified the three seesaw mechanisms that give neutrinos their tiny masses.

Ernest Marsden

Ernest Marsden was a British-born New Zealand physicist who detected alpha-particle backscattering in 1909, leading Rutherford to the nuclear atom, and later founded New Zealand's DSIR.

Ernest Merritt

Ernest George Merritt (1865–1948) was an American physicist at Cornell University who co-founded The Physical Review, served as the American Physical Society's first secretary, and later became its president.

Ernest O. Wollan

Ernest O. Wollan (died 1984) was an American physicist who established neutron diffraction as a practical crystal-analysis method at Oak Ridge, after developing the film-badge dosimeter for the Manhattan Project.

Ernest T.S. Walton

Ernest T.S. Walton (Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton) was an Irish physicist who split the atomic nucleus with John Cockcroft, winning the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Ernest William Brown

Ernest William Brown (1866–1938) was a British-born mathematician and astronomer who spent his career in the United States and became the leading authority on the Moon's motion.

Ernst Abbe

Ernst Abbe was a German physicist who created the diffraction theory of microscope imaging, designed Zeiss microscopes scientifically from 1872, and gave the company to a foundation with pioneering labor rules.

Ernst Bessel Hagen

Ernst Bessel Hagen (1851–1923) was a German physicist who directed the technical department of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt and, with Heinrich Rubens, confirmed Maxwell's theory of light.

Ernst Emil Alexander Back

Ernst Emil Alexander Back (1881–1959) was a German experimental physicist at the University of Tübingen, co-discoverer of the Paschen–Back and Back–Goudsmit effects, whose spectra fed Landé's g-factor formula.

Ernst Gehrcke

Ernst Gehrcke (1878–1960) was a German experimental physicist and optics specialist at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin, co-inventor of the Lummer–Gehrcke interferometer plate and a leading opponent of Einstein's relativity from 1911 to 1924.

Ernst Meyer (Swiss physicist)

Ernst Meyer is a Swiss experimental physicist at the University of Basel who works in scanning probe microscopy and nanotribology, demonstrating superlubricity of graphene nanoribbons on gold.