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Physicists and astronomers

3,698 articles

Henry Evelyn Derek Scovil

Henry Evelyn Derek Scovil (1923–2010) was a Canadian-born physicist who spent his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he built the first solid-state maser in 1957 and developed magnetic bubble memory.

Henry G. Booker

Henry G. Booker (1910–1988) was an English-born physicist and electrical engineer who studied radio-wave propagation in the ionosphere, taught at Cornell and UC San Diego, and created the Booker quartic.

Henry H. Barschall

Henry H. Barschall (1915–1997) was an American nuclear physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose fast-neutron measurements shaped the optical model of the nucleus and neutron cancer therapy.

Henry Kapteyn

Henry C. Kapteyn is a physicist and JILA Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder, known for ultrafast laser technology and tabletop coherent X-ray sources built by high-harmonic generation.

Henry Lin (theoretical physicist)

Henry WanJune Lin (born 1995) is an American theoretical physicist, a Princeton assistant professor since 2026, first known as a teenager for galaxy-cluster astrophysics research.

Henry M. Foley

Henry Michael Foley (1917–1982) was an American experimental physicist and Columbia University professor whose 1947 measurements of the electron's magnetic moment with Polykarp Kusch helped confirm quantum electrodynamics.

Henry Morton (American chemist)

Henry Morton (1836–1902) was an American chemist and physicist, the first president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, known for research on fluorescence and uranium-salt spectra.

Henry Moseley

Henry Moseley was an English physicist who showed by X-ray spectroscopy that elements should be ordered by atomic number; he was killed at Gallipoli in 1915.

Henry Norris Russell

Henry Norris Russell (1877–1957) was an American astronomer at Princeton University, remembered as a founder of modern theoretical astrophysics and for the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram relating stellar brightness to spectral type.

Henry Primakoff

Henry Primakoff (1914–1983) was a Russian-born American theoretical physicist, the first Donner Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, known for the Holstein–Primakoff spin-wave theory and the Primakoff effect.

Henry Rishbeth

Henry Rishbeth was a British ionospheric physicist, trained at Cambridge under J. A. Ratcliffe, whose definitive studies of the F2 layer earned the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 2001.

Henry Siedentopf

Henry Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf (1872–1940) was a German physicist at Carl Zeiss in Jena who co-invented the slit ultramicroscope with Richard Zsigmondy in 1903, making sub-wavelength colloidal particles visible.

Henry W. Kendall

Henry W. Kendall, born Henry Way Kendall, was an American MIT particle physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments revealing quarks inside protons and neutrons.

Herbert Callen

Herbert Callen (1919–1993) was an American theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, known for the 1951 fluctuation–dissipation theorem and a widely used thermodynamics textbook.

Herbert E. Ives

Herbert E. Ives, also known as Herbert Eugene Ives, was an American physicist who headed television and facsimile research at Bell Labs and ran the 1938 Ives–Stilwell experiment.

Herbert Friedman

Herbert Friedman (1916–2000) was an American physicist who pioneered X-ray astronomy at the Naval Research Laboratory, detecting solar X-rays in 1949 and X-ray pulsations from the Crab Nebula in 1969.

Herbert Fröhlich

Herbert Fröhlich (1905–1991) was a German-born British theoretical physicist who brought quantum field theory into solid-state physics, formulated the Hamiltonian behind superconductivity theory, and proposed coherent excitations in living cells.

Herbert Gursky

Herbert Gursky (c. 1930–2006) was an American astrophysicist who helped found X-ray astronomy, co-discovering Sco X-1 on the 1962 rocket flight and later leading HEAO-1 experiments.

Herbert Hall Turner

Herbert Hall Turner was a British astronomer and seismologist, Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford from 1893, who coined "parsec," led the Carte du Ciel survey, and discovered deep-focus earthquakes.

Herbert J. C. Kouts

Herbert J. C. Kouts (1920–2008) was an American nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who directed reactor safety research for the AEC and NRC, and served on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

Herbert John Shaw

Herbert John Shaw (1918–2006) was an American electrical engineer and applied physicist at Stanford University's Ginzton Laboratory, known for surface acoustic wave devices, fiber-optic gyroscopes, and fiber-optic amplifiers.

Herbert Kroemer

Herbert Kroemer (1928–2024) was a German-American physicist at UC Santa Barbara who won a quarter of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for semiconductor heterostructures.

Herbert L. Anderson

Herbert L. Anderson (1914–1988) was an American nuclear physicist who helped build Chicago Pile-1, the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, and received the 1982 Enrico Fermi Award.

Herbert Mataré

Herbert F. Mataré (1912–2011) was a German physicist who, with Heinrich Welker at Westinghouse's laboratory near Paris, invented the transistron in 1948 independently of Bell Labs, and founded Intermetall.

Herbert Wagner (German physicist)

Herbert Wagner (born 1935 in Munich) is a German theoretical physicist, professor emeritus at LMU Munich and a last student of Werner Heisenberg, best known for the 1966 Mermin–Wagner theorem.

Herbert Walther

Herbert Walther (1935–2006) was a German physicist whose one-atom maser, the micromaser, was a milestone of cavity quantum electrodynamics and a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics.

Herbert Zeiger

Herbert Zeiger was an American physicist trained under Isidor Rabi at Columbia who co-authored the 1954 ammonia maser paper and shared the inaugural Charles Hard Townes Award in 1981.

Herman Feshbach

Herman Feshbach (1917–2000) was an American theoretical nuclear physicist who spent his career at MIT, led its physics department, and named the Feshbach resonance, now essential for controlling ultracold atomic gases.

Herman Z. Cummins

Herman Z. Cummins (1933–2010) was an American experimental physicist who invented laser Doppler velocimetry and photon correlation spectroscopy, studied phase transitions by light scattering, and taught at City College of New York.

Herman Zanstra

Herman Zanstra was a Dutch astronomer who created the Zanstra method for estimating the temperatures of planetary-nebula central stars, publishing his foundational theory in 1927.