Physicists and astronomers

Jack Wisdom

Jack Wisdom is an American planetary scientist, professor at MIT since 1984, known for proving Pluto's motion is chaotic and for the 2022 Chrysalis hypothesis.

Jacob B. Khurgin, also published as J. B. Khurgin, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University, known for work on optics, plasmonics, and nonlinear optical materials.

Jacob Bekenstein

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) was a Mexican-born Israeli theoretical physicist who proposed in his 1972 Princeton thesis that black holes carry entropy proportional to their event-horizon area, founding black hole thermodynamics.

Jacob Clay

Jacob Clay (1882–1955) was a Dutch experimental physicist and philosopher who discovered the cosmic-ray latitude effect on voyages between Indonesia and the Netherlands in 1927–1928.

Jacob G. Wacker

Jacob G. Wacker is a theoretical particle physicist who taught at SLAC and Stanford, known for SIMP dark matter and simplified models for LHC new-particle searches.

Sep 20, 2026

Jacob Klein (physicist)

Jacob Klein, born 1949 in Tel Aviv, is a soft matter physicist at the Weizmann Institute known for discovering hydration lubrication and showing water stays fluid in subnanometer films.

Jacob L. Roberts

Jacob L. Roberts is an American atomic physicist and professor at Colorado State University known for the first stable rubidium-85 Bose-Einstein condensates and a 2006 PECASE award.

Jacob M. Taylor

Jacob M. Taylor is a theoretical quantum physicist at NIST, a NIST Fellow and co-founder of QuICS, who received the 2010 PECASE and helped implement the National Quantum Initiative.

Sep 20, 2026

Jacob N. Israelachvili

Jacob N. Israelachvili, also known as Jacob Israelachvili, was an Israeli-born chemical engineer and physicist at UC Santa Barbara who developed the Surface Forces Apparatus.

Jacobus Kapteyn

Jacobus Kapteyn (1851–1922) was a Dutch astronomer at the University of Groningen who used photography and star counts to found statistical astronomy, cataloging 454,875 southern stars and discovering the star streams.

Jacqueline Bloch

Jacqueline Bloch, born in 1967, is a French experimental physicist at CNRS who studies polaritons and quantum fluids of light, winning the 2026 CNRS Gold Medal.

Jacques Blamont

Jacques-Émile Blamont (1926–2020) was a French astrophysicist who founded France's first space laboratory, the Service d'aéronomie, and became the first scientific and technical director of CNES.

Jacques Curie

Jacques Curie (1856–1941) was a French physicist who, with his younger brother Pierre, co-discovered the piezoelectric effect in 1880 and later held a chair at Montpellier.

Jacques Friedel

Jacques Friedel (1921–2014) was a French theoretical physicist who worked on the electron theory of metals and alloys, known for Friedel oscillations and the Friedel sum rule.

Jacques Winter

Jacques Winter, also Jacques-Michel Winter, was a French physicist of the École Normale Supérieure named in the 1966 Nobel speech as a performer of the first optical pumping experiment.

Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval

Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval (1851–1940) was a French physicist and physician who invented the moving-coil galvanometer, the basis of virtually all panel pointer meters, and established high-frequency electrotherapy, known in France as darsonvalisation.

Jagadeesh S. Moodera

Jagadeesh S. Moodera, also published as J. S. Moodera, is an experimental condensed matter physicist at MIT known for the 1995 observation of room-temperature tunnel magnetoresistance.

Jaime Gómez Rivas

Jaime Gómez Rivas is a Spanish physicist, full professor and chair of the Surface Photonics group at Eindhoven University of Technology, known for nanophotonics and THz photonics.

Jainendra K. Jain

Jainendra K. Jain is a physicist at Penn State known for his composite-fermion theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect, honored with the 2025 Wolf Prize in Physics.

James A. Van Allen

James A. Van Allen (1914–2006) was an American space scientist at the University of Iowa who discovered Earth's radiation belts via Explorer 1 in 1958.

Sep 20, 2026

James B. Pollack

James B. Pollack (1938–1994) was an American astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center, a leading authority on planetary atmospheres who worked on missions from Mariner 9 to Cassini.

James Beacham

James Beacham is a particle physicist on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, affiliated with Duke University, and a science communicator with a widely viewed TED talk.

James Binney

James Binney is a British theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Oxford known for work on the structure and dynamics of galaxies and for the standard textbooks Galactic Dynamics and Galactic Astronomy.

James Bjorken

James "BJ" Bjorken (1934–2024) was an American theoretical physicist at SLAC and Fermilab known for Bjorken scaling, his 1968 proposal that made quarks inside the proton visible in electron scattering.

James Brown Fisk

James Brown Fisk (1910–1981) was an American physicist who helped develop the microwave magnetron for wartime radar and served as president of Bell Laboratories from 1959 to 1973.

James C. Bergquist

James C. Bergquist is an American physicist and NIST Fellow in Boulder, Colorado, a pioneer of single-ion optical atomic clocks elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

James C. G. Walker

James C. G. Walker (1939–2022) was a South African-born scientist, professor at the University of Michigan, best known for research on the origin and evolution of Earth's atmosphere.

James C. Wyant

James C. Wyant (1943–2023) was an American optical scientist who pioneered phase-shifting interferometry, founded WYKO and 4D Technology, and led the University of Arizona's optics college.

James Chadwick

James Chadwick (1891–1974) was a British physicist who discovered the neutron in 1932, won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics, and later led the British Mission to the Manhattan Project.