Physicists and astronomers

Joseph Incandela

Joseph Incandela is an American experimental particle physicist at UC Santa Barbara who, as CMS spokesperson at CERN, announced the Higgs boson discovery on July 4, 2012.

Joseph Kaplan

Joseph Kaplan (1902–1991) was an American physicist at UCLA who studied the light of the upper atmosphere, helped create aeronomy, and chaired the US committee for the International Geophysical Year.

Joseph Klafter

Joseph Klafter (יוסף קלפטר), known as Yossi Klafter, is an Israeli chemical physicist who introduced Lévy walks and served as Tel Aviv University's president from 2009 to 2019.

Joseph Larmor (1857–1942) was an Irish mathematical physicist at Cambridge, Lucasian Professor from 1903 to 1932, who first calculated the radiation of an accelerated electron and explained the magnetic splitting of spectrum lines.

Joseph Lovering

Joseph Lovering was an American mathematician and natural philosopher, Hollis Professor at Harvard from 1838 to 1888, known for his work on terrestrial magnetism and the aurora borealis.

Joseph P. Heremans

Joseph P. Heremans (1953–2025) was a Belgian-born condensed matter experimental physicist at Ohio State known for thermoelectrics and spin caloritronics, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013.

Joseph Polchinski

Joseph Polchinski (1954–2018) was an American theoretical physicist at UC Santa Barbara known for discovering D-branes, his two-volume textbook String Theory, and the 2012 black hole firewall argument.

Joseph Rotblat

Joseph Rotblat (Józef Rotblat, 1908–2005) was a Polish-born British physicist who left the Manhattan Project in 1944 and shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize with Pugwash.

Joseph Rudnick

Joseph Rudnick is a statistical physicist, UCLA professor emeritus and former Dean of Physical Sciences, known for the Rudnick–Gaspari asphericity and Rudnick–Hu winding-angle results and the textbook Elements of the Random Walk.

Joseph Saxton

Joseph Saxton (1799–1873) was an American inventor and metrologist who built the magneto-electric machine in London in 1832, took the oldest extant American photograph in 1839, and led the U.S. Office of Weights and Measures.

Sep 20, 2026

Joseph Silk

Joseph Silk, born 1942 in London, is a British and US cosmologist known for Silk damping, cosmic microwave background anisotropy theory, and the physics of galaxy formation.

Joseph Sweetman Ames

Joseph Sweetman Ames (1864–1943) was an American physicist and Johns Hopkins University president known for spectroscopy research and chairing the NACA, forerunner of NASA's Ames Research Center.

Joseph Veverka

Joseph Frank Veverka, born 1941, is an American planetary astronomer and Cornell professor emeritus who led imaging teams on Voyager, Galileo, NEAR, and Deep Impact, and won the 2013 Kuiper Prize.

Joseph W. Orenstein

Joseph W. Orenstein is an experimental condensed matter physicist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, known for ultrafast optical studies of quantum materials.

Joseph W. Perry

Joseph W. Perry (1955–2022) was an American physical chemist and Georgia Tech professor known for two-photon absorption, optical limiting, and 3D microfabrication, and a 1999 Nature paper.

Joseph Weber

Joseph Weber (1919–2000) was an American physicist at the University of Maryland who founded the experimental search for gravitational waves and pioneered the resonant bar detector.

Joseph Winlock

Joseph Winlock (1826–1875) was an American astronomer, third director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1866, and a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Joseph Wyan Chamberlain

Joseph Wyan Chamberlain (1928–2004) was an American astronomer and geophysicist specializing in the aurora, airglow, and planetary atmospheres; an airglow band system bears his name.

Joshua A. Breslau

Joshua A. Breslau, also known as Joshua Adam Breslau, is an American computational plasma physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory known for the M3D simulation codes.

Joshua C. Bienfang

Joshua C. Bienfang is an American physicist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, working on quantum communications and single-photon detection, who received a Presidential Early Career Award in 2006.

Joshua D. Caldwell

Joshua D. Caldwell, also known as Joshua Caldwell, is an American materials scientist and professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University known for phonon polariton research.

Sep 20, 2026

Joshua Jortner

Joshua Jortner (Hebrew: יהושע יורטנר), born in Poland in 1933, is an Israeli physical chemist at Tel Aviv University known for radiationless transitions and electron transfer theory.

Joshua N. Goldberg

Joshua N. Goldberg, also known as Joshua Norman Goldberg, was an American mathematical physicist at Syracuse University known for the 1962 Goldberg–Sachs theorem on Einstein's equations.

Joshua Silver

Joshua Silver is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford who invented self-adjusting eyeglasses, fluid-filled lenses wearers dial to their own prescription, distributed in developing countries.

Joshua Winn

Joshua Winn is an astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton who studies exoplanetary systems, known for measuring spin-orbit alignment and authoring The Little Book of Exoplanets (2023).

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was an American theoretical physicist and chemist who spent his career at Yale, laying the foundation of chemical thermodynamics with papers published from 1876 to 1878.

Józef Lubański

Józef Kazimierz Lubański (1914–1946) was a Polish theoretical physicist known for the Pauli–Lubański vector, still used in field-equation analyses; he died unexpectedly in Delft, aged thirty-two.

Sep 20, 2026

Jr-Hau He

Jr-Hau He is a Hong Kong-based optoelectronics researcher known for photon management in solar cells and photodetectors, a professor at City University of Hong Kong.

Juan Carlos Campuzano

Juan Carlos Campuzano is an American condensed matter physicist, born in Paraguay, who pioneered ARPES studies of cuprate high-temperature superconductors and won the 2011 Buckley Prize.