Physicists and astronomers

Gordon Danby

Gordon Danby (1929–2016) was a Canadian-born physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who, with James R. Powell, invented superconducting maglev trains, earning the 2000 Benjamin Franklin Medal.

Gordon Ferrie Hull (1870–1956) was a Canadian-born American physicist who, with Ernest Fox Nichols at Dartmouth College, made the first precise measurement of the pressure of light, and taught physics there for 41 years.

Gordon Gould

Gordon Gould (1920–2005) was an American physicist who coined the word "laser" as a Columbia graduate student in 1957 and spent nearly 30 years winning his patents.

Gordon Pettengill

Gordon Pettengill (1926–2021) was an American radio astronomer and MIT professor who pioneered radar studies of the Moon, Mercury, and Venus, and directed the Arecibo Observatory.

Gordon Walker (Canadian astronomer)

Gordon A. H. Walker (born 1936) is a Canadian astronomer and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who was among the first to detect planets around other stars.

Gordon Walter Semenoff

Gordon Walter Semenoff is a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia who identified the parity anomaly and showed in 1984 that graphene's electrons obey a Dirac equation.

Gösta Ekspong

Gösta Ekspong (1922–2017) was a Swedish particle physicist, professor at Stockholm University from 1960 to 1988, who discovered neutral pions in cosmic rays and chaired the Nobel physics committee.

Gou Lijun

Gou Lijun (苟利军) is a Chinese astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences known for measuring black hole spins, including Cygnus X-1.

Sep 20, 2026

Graham R. Fleming

Graham R. Fleming, born in Barrow, England, in 1949, is a physical chemist at UC Berkeley known for developing two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy and applying it to photosynthesis.

Graham Ross (theoretical physicist)

Graham Ross (1944–2021) was a British theoretical particle physicist at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and winner of the 2012 Dirac Medal.

Grant H. Stokes

Grant H. Stokes is an American physicist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory who directs the LINEAR program, which has found about half of near-Earth asteroids discovered since 1998.

Greg Moore

Gregory W. Moore is an American theoretical physicist at Rutgers University working on string theory, M-theory, and gauge theory, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Greg Pitz

Greg Pitz is an American laser physicist at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, who received a PECASE award in 2012.

Grégoire Nicolis

Grégoire Nicolis (1939–2018) was a Belgian physicist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles who helped build the theory of dissipative structures and co-created the Brusselator model with Ilya Prigogine.

Gregor Wentzel

Gregor Wentzel was a German-born theoretical physicist known for the WKB approximation and the first quantum field theory book, holding the Zurich chair from 1928 to 1948 before moving to Chicago.

Gregory A. Fiete

Gregory A. Fiete is an American theoretical condensed matter physicist, a professor at Northeastern University known for work on topological quantum matter and chiral phonons.

Gregory Breit

Gregory Breit was an American nuclear and theoretical physicist, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1939, known for the Breit interaction and the Breit–Wigner formula.

Sep 20, 2026

Gregory D. Scholes

Gregory D. Scholes is an Australian-born physical chemist, the William S. Tod Professor of Chemistry at Princeton, known for ultrafast laser spectroscopy of photosynthetic light harvesting and quantum coherence.

Gregory Fuchs

Gregory D. Fuchs is an American applied physicist, the James R. Meehl Professor at Cornell University, known for quantum sensing and spin control using defects in diamond, hBN, and GaN.

Gregory G. Howes

Gregory G. Howes is a theoretical plasma physicist and professor at the University of Iowa who studies turbulence in the solar wind and received a 2010 Presidential Early Career Award.

Gregory Wannier

Gregory Wannier was a physicist whose name attaches to foundational objects of solid-state physics: Wannier functions, Wannier excitons, the Stark ladder, and Kramers–Wannier duality.

Grigory Landsberg

Grigory Samuilovich Landsberg was a Soviet physicist and full USSR Academy of Sciences member who, with Leonid Mandelstam, discovered Raman scattering in crystals in February 1928.

Grote Reber

Grote Reber was an American radio engineer who, working alone after Karl Jansky's 1933 discovery, built the world's first radio telescope in 1937 and made the first radio maps of the sky.

Guenter Ahlers (engineer)

Guenter Ahlers is an experimental physicist known for critical phenomena near the superfluid transition of liquid helium and for experiments on convection, pattern formation, and turbulent heat transport.

Guglielmo Lanzani

Guglielmo Lanzani is an Italian physicist and full professor at the Politecnico di Milano who studies organic photophysics and develops light-sensitive interfaces, including a retinal prosthesis for degenerative blindness.

Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor of wireless telegraphy, or radio, who received the first wireless patent in 1896 and won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Guido Münch

Guido Münch (1921–2020) was a Mexican astrophysicist known for work on galactic structure, stellar atmospheres, and Mars, whose 1964 Mars spectrum analysis cut the accepted atmospheric pressure tenfold.

Guifré Vidal

Guifré Vidal (Guifré Vidal Bonafont) is a physicist who pioneered tensor-network methods such as MPS and MERA for quantum many-body simulation, working at Google Quantum AI and the Perimeter Institute in Canada.

Guillaume Bigourdan

Guillaume Bigourdan (1851–1932) was a French astronomer at the Paris Observatory who measured the positions of 6380 nebulae and became the first director of the Bureau International de l'Heure.