Physicists and astronomers

Harold K. Forsen

Harold K. Forsen (1932–2012) was an American plasma physicist who worked on fusion at General Atomics, built the University of Wisconsin–Madison's fusion program, and later served as an executive at Exxon Nuclear and Bechtel.

Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley

Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley was a British statistical physicist who solved the close-packed dimer problem with Michael Fisher in 1961 and gave his name to the Temperley–Lieb algebra.

Harold P. Eubank

Harold Porter Eubank was an American physicist who spent 1959 to 1985 at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, heading neutral beam research for magnetic fusion experiments.

Harold Spencer Jones

Harold Spencer Jones (1890–1960) was an English astronomer who served as Astronomer Royal from 1933 to 1955 and determined the solar parallax from observations of Eros.

Harold Y. Hwang

Harold Y. Hwang (황윤성) is an American condensed matter physicist, professor at Stanford and SLAC, known for superconductivity in infinite-layer nickelates and emergent phenomena at oxide interfaces.

Harrie Massey

Harrie Massey, full name Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey, was an Australian-born mathematical physicist who built atomic collision theory in Britain and led its early space program.

Harry A. Atwater

Harry A. Atwater is an American applied physicist and electrical engineer at Caltech who gave plasmonics its name in 2001 and directs research on solar fuels and photovoltaics.

Sep 17, 2026

Harry Albert Atwater Jr.

Harry Albert Atwater Jr., also known as Harry A. Atwater Jr., is an American applied physicist at Caltech known for plasmonics, metasurfaces, and solar energy research.

Harry Cliff

Harry Cliff is an experimental particle physicist at the University of Cambridge and a member of the LHCb experiment at CERN, searching rare beauty decays for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Harry Hemley Plaskett

Harry Hemley Plaskett (1893–1980) was a Canadian astronomer and Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford from 1932 to 1960, a pioneer of rigorous observational astrophysics and solar spectroscopy.

Harry L. Swinney

Harry L. Swinney (1939–2026) was an American experimental physicist at the University of Texas at Austin known for table-top experiments on chaos, pattern formation, and turbulence.

Harry Lehmann

Harry Lehmann (1924–1998) was a German theoretical physicist who, with Symanzik and Zimmermann, co-created the LSZ reduction formula and the Källén–Lehmann spectral representation, core tools of quantum field theory.

Harry Suhl

Harry Suhl (1922–2020) was a German-born American condensed-matter physicist known for his work on magnetism, including the Suhl instability, and a founding faculty member of UC San Diego.

Hartland Snyder

Hartland Snyder was an American theoretical physicist who co-authored the 1939 Oppenheimer–Snyder gravitational collapse paper and the 1952 strong-focusing accelerator paper, and proposed quantized space-time in 1947.

Hartmut Löwen

Hartmut Löwen, born 1963 in Hamm, Germany, is a German theoretical physicist who holds the soft matter chair at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and studies active matter.

Harvey Brooks (physicist)

Harvey Brooks (1915–2004) was an American applied physicist who served as dean of Harvard's engineering school from 1957 to 1975 and led national science policy.

Sep 17, 2026

Harvey D. Tananbaum

Harvey D. Tananbaum is an American X-ray astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, best known as the founding director of the Chandra X-ray Center from 1991 to 2014.

Harvey Fletcher

Harvey Fletcher (1884–1981) was an American physicist who directed acoustical research at Bell Telephone Laboratories and pioneered stereophonic sound, the vacuum-tube hearing aid, and loudness measurement.

Harvey Raymond Butcher

Harvey Raymond Butcher, born 1947 in Salem, Massachusetts, is a Dutch-American astronomer best known as co-discoverer of the Butcher–Oemler effect, the excess of blue galaxies in distant rich clusters.

Hatice Altug

Hatice Altug is a Turkish physicist and engineer, a full professor at EPFL since 2020 who leads its Bionanophotonic Systems Laboratory, known for nanophotonic and plasmonic biosensing and metasurface molecular barcoding.

Heather Couper

Heather Anita Couper (1949–2020) was a British astronomer and broadcaster who wrote more than 40 books and was the first woman to serve as President of the British Astronomical Association.

Heber Doust Curtis

Heber Doust Curtis (1872–1942) was an American astronomer who spent eighteen years at the Lick Observatory and argued in the 1920 Shapley–Curtis Debate that spiral nebulae are separate galaxies.

Heejun Yang

Heejun Yang (양희준) is a South Korean condensed matter physicist, professor at KAIST since 2024, known for the graphene barristor in Science in 2012 and MoTe2 homojunction contacts.

Heidi B. Hammel

Heidi B. Hammel is an American planetary astronomer known for her studies of Uranus and Neptune and for leading the Hubble team observing Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9's 1994 impacts on Jupiter.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) was a Dutch physicist who liquefied helium in 1908 and discovered superconductivity in 1911, winning the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Heino Falcke

Heino Falcke, born 1966 in Cologne, is a German radio astronomer at Radboud University who coined "black hole shadow" and led the 2019 first black hole image.

Heinrich Barkhausen

Heinrich Georg Barkhausen was a German physicist and electrical engineer who discovered the Barkhausen effect in 1919 and held the world's first professorship in communications engineering, at Dresden from 1911.

Heinrich Bruns

Ernst Heinrich Bruns (1848–1919) was a German astronomer and mathematician, professor of astronomy at Leipzig from 1882, known for Bruns' theorem and his definition of geodesy.

Sep 17, 2026

Heinrich Hertz

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first generated and detected electromagnetic waves in 1887, proving Maxwell's theory; the unit hertz is named for him.