Physicists and astronomers

James Craig Watson

James Craig Watson (1838–1880) was a Canadian-American astronomer who discovered 22 asteroids, directed the Detroit and Washburn observatories, and left a bequest funding the National Academy's Watson Medal.

James Cronin

James Watson Cronin (1931–2016) was an American particle physicist at the University of Chicago who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with Val Fitch for discovering CP violation in neutral K-meson decay.

James D. Callen

James D. Callen is a fusion plasma theorist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a National Academy of Engineering member known for tokamak transport theory.

James Dungey

James Wynne Dungey (1923–2015) was a British space scientist who proposed in 1961 that Earth's magnetosphere is open, via magnetic reconnection, the foundation of modern magnetospheric physics.

James E. Gunn

James E. Gunn, born in Texas in 1938, is an American astrophysicist and Princeton professor who conceived and led the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, winning the Kyoto Prize in 2019.

James Edward Keeler

James Edward Keeler (1857–1900) was an American astronomer and astrophysicist who proved Saturn's rings are countless orbiting particles and photographed hundreds of spiral nebulae at Lick Observatory.

James F. Kasting

James F. Kasting, also published as James Kasting, is an American geoscientist at Penn State known for his 1993 theory of habitable zones around stars.

James F. Scott

James F. Scott, also known as James Floyd Scott (1942–2020), was an American physicist known as the father of integrated ferroelectrics, whose work enabled FeRAM memory in game consoles and railway fare cards.

James Franck

James Franck (1882–1964) was a German-born physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics for the Franck–Hertz experiment, the first direct evidence for discrete atomic energy states.

James G. Fujimoto

James G. Fujimoto is Elihu Thomson Professor at MIT and co-inventor of optical coherence tomography, the laser-based eye imaging method used in tens of millions of procedures yearly.

James Glimm

James Glimm (born 1934) is an American mathematician and computational physicist at Stony Brook University, known for constructive quantum field theory and front-tracking fluid dynamics.

James Hartle

James Hartle (1939–2023) was an American gravitational physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, best known for the no-boundary wave function of the universe.

Sep 20, 2026

James Hone

James Hone is an experimental condensed-matter physicist and Wang Fong-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, known for pioneering work on graphene and 2D materials.

James Hough

Sir James (Jim) Hough, born in 1945, is a British experimental physicist at Glasgow who led development of the mirror suspensions that made LIGO's 2015 gravitational-wave detection possible.

James J. Bock

James J. (Jamie) Bock is an American experimental cosmologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, known for Boomerang, Planck, Spider, CIBER, and the SPHEREx mission.

James J. Wynne

James J. Wynne is an American physicist at IBM Research, born in Brooklyn, New York, best known as co-discoverer of excimer laser surgery, which underlies LASIK and PRK refractive procedures.

James Jeans

Sir James Jeans was an English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer known for the Rayleigh-Jeans law and the Jeans instability, and for popular books like The Mysterious Universe.

James L. Kinsey

James L. Kinsey (1934–2014) was an American physical chemist who co-invented stimulated emission pumping with Robert W. Field, taught at MIT, and served as dean at Rice University.

James M. Bardeen

James M. Bardeen (1939–2022) was an American theoretical physicist at the University of Washington who co-authored the 1973 four laws of black hole mechanics with Stephen Hawking.

James M. Moran

James M. Moran is an American radio astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian who works on very-long-baseline interferometry, cosmic masers, and supermassive black holes.

James M. Stone

James M. Stone is a computational astrophysicist and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, known for the ZEUS and Athena astrophysical simulation codes.

James Melville Gilliss

James Melville Gilliss (1811–1865) was an American naval officer and astronomer who planned the first United States Naval Observatory and founded the observatory that became the Chilean National Observatory.

James P. Eisenstein

James P. Eisenstein, known as Jim Eisenstein, is an experimental condensed-matter physicist and emeritus professor at Caltech, known for the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall state and bilayer exciton condensation.

James P. Sethna

James P. Sethna is a condensed-matter and statistical physicist, Professor of Physics at Cornell University since 1995, known for crackling noise, hysteresis in disordered systems, and the sloppy models framework.

James Peebles (cosmologist)

James Peebles is a Canadian-born American cosmologist at Princeton who won half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology.

James Power Gordon

James Power Gordon (1928–2013) was an American physicist who built the first maser as a doctoral student at Columbia University, then worked on optical communication at Bell Labs.

James Prescott Joule

James Prescott Joule (1818–1889) was an English physicist who established that heat is a form of energy, measured the mechanical equivalent of heat, and formulated Joule's law.

James R. Asay

James R. Asay is an American shock physicist who spent 32 years at Sandia National Laboratories and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.

James R. Powell

James R. Powell was an American nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who co-invented superconducting maglev with Gordon Danby, earning the 2000 Benjamin Franklin Medal.