Physicists and astronomers

John August Anderson

John August Anderson (1876–1959) was an American astrophysicist and spectroscopist known for ruling diffraction gratings, solar spectroscopy at Mount Wilson, and the Palomar telescope's optics.

John Bally is an astrophysicist and Professor Emeritus of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, known for research on star formation, protostellar outflows, and stellar feedback.

John Bardeen

John Bardeen was an American physicist, the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, for the transistor in 1956 and superconductivity theory in 1972.

John C. Mather

John C. Mather is an American astrophysicist at NASA Goddard who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for measuring the cosmic microwave background from the COBE satellite.

John C. Polanyi

John C. Polanyi, also known as John Polanyi, is a Canadian chemist at the University of Toronto who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for infrared chemiluminescence.

John C. Slater

John Clarke Slater (1900–1976) was an American theoretical physicist who led MIT's physics department for two decades and created the Slater determinant, Slater-type orbitals, and the Xα method.

John Campbell Brown

John Campbell Brown (1947–2019) was a British solar physicist who held Glasgow's Regius Professorship of Astronomy and served as the 10th Astronomer Royal for Scotland.

John Cardy

John Cardy is a British theoretical physicist, long at Oxford, known for the Cardy formula, boundary conformal field theory, and the a-theorem, and a 2024 Breakthrough Prize laureate.

John Carlstrom

John Carlstrom (born 1957) is an American experimental astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who leads the South Pole Telescope, measuring the cosmic microwave background.

John Chalker

John T. Chalker is a condensed matter theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, known for the 1988 Chalker–Coddington network model describing the integer quantum Hall plateau transition.

John Clarke (physicist)

John Clarke, born 1942, is a British-born condensed matter physicist at UC Berkeley known for pioneering SQUIDs and for one third of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

John Clauser

John F. Clauser, born 1942 in Pasadena, California, is an American physicist who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments with entangled photons that violated Bell inequalities.

John Clive Ward

John Clive Ward (1924–2000) was a British theoretical physicist who proved the 1950 Ward identity, a foundation of renormalization theory, and co-developed electroweak theory with Abdus Salam.

John Cockcroft

John Cockcroft, also known as Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, was a British nuclear physicist who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for splitting the atom and directed Britain's Harwell atomic research establishment.

John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams (1819–1892) was a British mathematician and astronomer at Cambridge who independently predicted Neptune's position and worked on the Moon's motion and the Leonid meteors.

John Cunningham McLennan

John Cunningham McLennan (1867–1935) was a Canadian physicist who led the University of Toronto physics laboratory and identified the auroral green line as emission from atomic oxygen.

John D. Barrow

John D. Barrow, also known as John David Barrow, was a British cosmologist and Cambridge professor who won the 2006 Templeton Prize for popularizing science.

John D. Joannopoulos

John D. Joannopoulos (1947–2025) was an MIT condensed-matter theoretical physicist who helped create photonic crystals, materials that control light the way semiconductors control electrons, and co-founded six startups.

John David Jackson

John David Jackson (1925–2016) was a Canadian-born theoretical physicist who worked in particle, nuclear, and atomic physics at UC Berkeley, best known for the graduate textbook Classical Electrodynamics.

John E. Bortle

John E. Bortle is an American amateur astronomer in Stormville, New York, best known for creating the nine-level Bortle Dark-Sky Scale and for decades of comet and variable-star observing.

John E. Kunzler

John E. Kunzler, often called Gene Kunzler, was a Bell Labs physicist whose 1961 niobium-tin discovery showed superconductors could carry huge currents in strong magnetic fields.

Sep 20, 2026

John Ellis (theoretical physicist)

John Ellis (Jonathan Richard Ellis, born 1946) is a British theoretical particle physicist who pioneered Higgs and supersymmetry phenomenology, led CERN's Theory Division, and joined King's College London in 2010.

John Evershed

John Evershed (1864–1956) was an English astronomer who discovered the Evershed effect, the radial outflow of gases from sunspot centers, in 1909 while directing the Kodaikanal Observatory in India.

John F. Allen

John F. Allen, also known as John Frank Allen, was a Canadian physicist who discovered superfluidity in liquid helium-4 in 1937 and the fountain effect weeks later.

John F. Brady

John F. Brady, born 1954, is an American fluid mechanician and rheologist, the Chevron Professor at Caltech known for Stokesian dynamics and the swim pressure of active matter.

John F. Hawley

John F. Hawley (1958–2021) was an American astrophysicist at the University of Virginia who, with Steven Balbus, identified the magnetorotational instability that lets gas spiral inward through accretion disks.

John F. Mitchell

John F. Mitchell is an American condensed matter physicist and chemist, an Argonne Distinguished Fellow whose synthesis-driven research spans quantum magnets, iridates, and topological materials.

John F. Mustard

John F. Mustard, known as Jack Mustard, is a planetary scientist and professor at Brown University, deputy principal investigator of the CRISM Mars spectrometer and a 2011 AAAS Fellow.

John Finney

John L. Finney is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at University College London whose research centers on water, ices, liquids, and random packing, begun as J. D. Bernal's assistant at Birkbeck College in 1965.