Physicists and astronomers

Hans Geiger

Hans Geiger (Johannes Wilhelm Geiger, 1882–1945) was a German experimental physicist whose alpha-scattering experiments with Marsden verified Rutherford's nuclear atom and whose particle counter became the Geiger–Müller tube.

Hans Geitel

Hans Geitel, full name Hans Friedrich Karl Geitel (1855–1923), was a German physicist and schoolteacher in Wolfenbüttel who, with Julius Elster, published about 130 papers pioneering radioactivity research and atmospheric electricity.

Sep 17, 2026

Hans Georg Dehmelt

Hans Georg Dehmelt was a German-American physicist at the University of Washington who developed the Penning trap and shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hans J. Herrmann

Hans J. Herrmann (born 1954) is a German theoretical and computational physicist known for work on granular media and sand dunes, a CNRS researcher in Paris since 2019.

Hans Jakob Wörner

Hans Jakob Wörner is a Swiss-based physicist and physical chemist, a full professor at ETH Zurich known for attosecond spectroscopy of molecules and liquids and attosecond control of chiral photoionization.

Hans Kramers

Hans Kramers, full name Hendrik Anthony Kramers, was a Dutch theoretical physicist (1894–1952) and Niels Bohr's first assistant, known for the Kramers–Heisenberg dispersion formula and WKB method.

Hans Thirring

Hans Thirring (1888–1976) was an Austrian theoretical physicist at the University of Vienna who predicted the Lense–Thirring effect in 1918 and later co-founded the Pugwash movement.

Hans-Arwed Weidenmüller

Hans-Arwed Weidenmüller, born 1933 in Dresden, is a German theoretical physicist known for the statistical theory of nuclear reactions based on random matrices, and for work on quantum chaos.

Hans-Joachim Queisser

Hans-Joachim Queisser (1931–2025) was a German semiconductor physicist who, with William Shockley, established the Shockley–Queisser limit for solar cell efficiency, and founded the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.

Hans-Jürgen Borchers

Hans-Jürgen Borchers (1926–2011) was a German mathematical physicist and leading figure in algebraic quantum field theory, professor at Göttingen from 1966 and recipient of the 1994 Max Planck Medal.

Hans-Walter Rix

Hans-Walter Rix is a German galactic astronomer, director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg since 1999, known for reconstructing the Milky Way's formation history from Gaia data.

Hans‐Jürgen Butt

Hans-Jürgen Butt is a German physicist, born in Hamburg in 1961, who studies wetting and drop friction and directs the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz.

Hans‐Thomas Janka

Hans-Thomas Janka (born 1960) is a German astrophysicist who leads a core-collapse supernova research group at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

Harald Ade

Harald Ade is a physicist at North Carolina State University who developed NEXAFS microscopy and resonant soft X-ray scattering, methods used to study organic solar cell morphology and stability.

Harald Brune

Harald Brune, born 1961, is a Full Professor at EPFL in Lausanne who studies nanoscale magnetism, epitaxial growth, and single-atom magnets, including magnetic remanence in single atoms.

Harald Fritzsch

Harald Fritzsch (1943–2022) was a German theoretical physicist who, with Murray Gell-Mann and Heinrich Leutwyler, co-founded quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong interaction, and later shaped quark mass matrices and neutrino physics.

Harald Gießen

Harald Gießen, also spelled Harald Giessen, is a German physicist and professor at the University of Stuttgart since 2005, known for founding 3D-printed microoptics and imaging plasmonic skyrmions.

Harald Lesch

Harald Lesch (born 1960 in Gießen) is a German theoretical astrophysicist and professor at LMU Munich, known for the ZDF shows Leschs Kosmos and Terra X.

Harald R. Telle

Harald R. Telle is a German physicist at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig who helped build optical interval dividers and proposed self-referencing for frequency combs in 1999.

Harald Rose

Harald Rose (1935–2026) was a German theoretical physicist and electron optician whose hexapole corrector, proposed in 1990, enabled atomic-resolution electron microscopy and won him the 2020 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience.

Sep 17, 2026

Hari Shroff

Hari Shroff is an American optical microscopist known for building fast, gentle super-resolution and light-sheet microscopes for living specimens, and winner of a 2010 PECASE award.

Harlow Shapley

Harlow Shapley was an American astronomer who located the center of the Milky Way in Sagittarius and directed the Harvard College Observatory from 1921 to 1952.

Harold Agnew

Harold Agnew was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor, flew on the Hiroshima mission, and directed Los Alamos from 1970 to 1979.

Harold Brown (physicist)

Harold Brown (1927–2019) was an American nuclear physicist who directed Lawrence Livermore, led Caltech, and was the first scientist to serve as U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Harold Delos Babcock

Harold Delos Babcock (1882–1968) was an American astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory known for precision solar spectroscopy, ruled diffraction gratings, and the first measurement of the Sun's general magnetic field.

Harold Ewen

Harold Irving Ewen was an American radio astronomer and microwave engineer who, as a Harvard graduate student with Edward Purcell, first detected the 21-centimeter line of neutral hydrogen in 1951.

Harold F. Levison

Harold F. Levison, known as Hal Levison, is an American planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and principal investigator of NASA's Lucy mission.

Harold Furth

Harold Furth (1930–2002) was an Austrian-born American plasma physicist who directed the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1981 to 1990 and conceived the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor.

Harold Hopkins (physicist)

Harold Horace Hopkins (1918–1994) was a British physicist and professor of applied optics at Reading whose fibrescope, announced in 1954, and rod-lens endoscope transformed minimally invasive surgery.