- Albert Einstein
This German born physicist is considered one of the world's greatest thinkers in history. Not only did he shape the way people think of time, space, matter, energy, and gravity but he also was a supporter of Zionism and peaceful living. Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm Germany, and spent most of his youth living in Munich, where his family owned a small electric machinery shop. He attended schooling in Munich, which he found unimaginative and dull.
- Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (September 29, 1901 - November 28, 1954) was an Italian physicist most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, particle physics and statistical mechanics. Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.
- Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, …
- Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, and acknowledged to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. He was born in Würzburg, Germany and died in Munich. Heisenberg was the head of German nuclear energy project, though the nature of this project, and his work in this capacity, has been heavily debated.
- Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.
- John C. Mather
John Cromwell Mather (b. August 7, 1946 in Roanoke, Virginia), is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with George F. Smoot for "their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
- Steven Chu
Steven Chu, born 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri, is an American experimental physicist. He is known for his research in laser cooling and trapping of atoms, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. His current research is concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. He is currently Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology of University of California, …
- Max Born
Max Born (December 11, 1882 - January 5, 1970) was a German mathematician and physicist. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics
- George Smoot
George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20 1945) is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather for "their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe using the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite.
- Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929 in Manhattan, New York City, USA) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
- Frank Wilczek
Frank Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is a Nobel prize-winning American theoretical physicist. Along with H. David Politzer and David Gross, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".
- Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi [gue:lmo mar'ko:ni] (25 April 1874 - 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, best known for his development of a radiotelegraph system, which served as the foundation for the establishment of numerous affiliated companies worldwide. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
- Julian Schwinger
Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 -- July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He formulated the theory of renormalization and posited a phenomenon of electron-positron pairs known as the Schwinger effect. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), along with Richard Feynman and Shinichiro Tomonaga
- Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS (August 8, 1902 - October 20, 1984) was a British theoretical physicist and a founder of the field of quantum mechanics. He held the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and spent the last ten years of his life at Florida State University. Among other discoveries, he formulated the so-called "Dirac equation," which describes the behavior of fermions and which led to the prediction of the existence of antimatter.
- Heinrich Rohrer
Heinrich Rohrer is a Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate. He was born in St. Gallen half an hour after his twin sister. He enjoyed a carefree country childhood until the family moved to Zürich in 1949. He enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1951, where he studied with Wolfgang Pauli. His doctoral dissertation was on his work measuring the length changes of superconductors at the magnetic-field-induced superconducting transition, …
- Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe (pronounced "BAY-tuh"); (July 2 1906--March 6, 2005), was a German-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory developing the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons, …
- Wolfgang Ketterle
Dr. Ketterle received a master's degree from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and a PhD in physics from the University of Munich (1986). After postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, at the University of Heidelberg and at MIT, in 1993 he joined the physics faculty at MIT, where he is now the John D. MacArthur Professor.
- Carl Wieman
Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26 1951) is a Nobel-prize winning American physicist at the University of British Columbia who (with Eric Allin Cornell), in 1995, produced the first true Bose-Einstein condensate. Wieman joined the University of British Columbia physics faculty on January 1st, 2007 and is heading a well-endowed science education program there; he retains a 20% appointment at University of Colorado, …
- Gerd Binnig
Gerd Binnig (born July 20, 1947) is a German physicist, and a Nobel laureate. He was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a physicist, but he soon wondered whether he had made the right choice. He concentrated more on music, playing in a band.
- Roy J. Glauber
Roy Jay Glauber is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Born in New York City, he was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch.
- John L. Hall
John Lewis "Jan" Hall is an American physicist. He shared one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch for his work in precision spectroscopy. Hall holds three degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology, a B.S. (1956), an M.S. (1958), and a Ph.D. (1961). He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Department of Commerce's National Bureau of Standards (now known as NIST) and then worked there from 1962 until his retirement in 2004.
- Frederick Reines
Frederick Reines was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment, and may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties".
- Masatoshi Koshiba
Masatoshi Koshiba (小柴 昌俊 "Koshiba Masatoshi", born on September 19, 1926 in Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture) is a Japanese physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002. He graduated from the University of Tokyo, School of Science in 1951 and received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Rochester, New York, in 1955. He then joined the University of Tokyo, where he became professor in 1960 and emeritus professor in 1987.
- David Gross
David Jonathan Gross is an American particle physicist and string theorist (although he's stated to the Brazilian newspaper "Folha de São Paulo", on 09/27/2006, that the second area is included in the first one). Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the "2004" "Nobel Prize in Physics" for his discovery of asymptotic freedom. In 1973, Gross, working with his first graduate student, Frank Wilczek, at Princeton University, …
- Burton Richter
Burton Richter (born March 22 1931) is a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. A native of New York City, he attended MIT, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1956. He was director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1984 to 1999.
- Dennis Gabor
Dennis Gabor, FRS, (June 5, 1900, Budapest - February 9, 1979, London) was a Hungarian physicist and inventor, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (June 28, 1906 - February 20, 1972) was a German-born American physicist. In 1963 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, becoming one of only two women to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics (the other being Marie Curie).
- Jack Steinberger
Jack Steinberger (born May 25, 1921) is a German-American physicist. He co-discovered the muon neutrino. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988. Steinberger was born in the city of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany, but left at the age of 13, due to the increasing anti-Semitism of the rising Nazi party. He moved to the United States, where he lived for many years, before moving to Switzerland to work at CERN.
- H. David Politzer
Hugh David Politzer (born 31 August 1949) is an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics. Politzer was born in New York City. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1966, received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1969, and his Ph.D. in 1974 from Harvard University, …
- Max von Laue
Max Theodore Felix von Laue (October 9, 1879 in Pfaffendorf, near Koblenz - April 24, 1960 in Berlin) was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. He was staunchly and openly in opposition to National Socialism. In addition to his scientific endeavors with contributions in optics, crystallography, quantum theory, superconductivity, and the theory of relativity, …
- Owen Chamberlain
Owen Chamberlain was a prominent American physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1959 with his collaborator Emilio Segrè for their discovery of the antiproton, a fundamental particle. Born in San Francisco, Chamberlain graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1937. He studied physics at Dartmouth College (A.B. 1941), where he was a member of Theta Chi Fraternity, and at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Klaus von Klitzing
Klaus von Klitzing is a German physicist. For his discovery of the Integer Quantum Hall Effect he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics. After studying physics in Braunschweig, von Klitzing spent 10 research years at University Würzburg (Ph.D. thesis 1972 on "Galvanomagnetic Properties of Tellurium in Strong Magnetic Fields", habilitation 1978), with research work at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford and High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Grenoble.
- Georges Charpak
Georges Charpak is a Polish-French physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics winner. Charpak was born in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland (modern Dubrovytsia, Ukraine) to a Jewish family of Polish/Ukrainian origin as Jerzy Charpak. Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old. During World War II Charpak served in the resistance and was imprisoned by Vichy authorities in 1943. In 1944 he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, …
- Leon M. Lederman
Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922 in New York) is an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for his work on neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998.
- Lev Landau
Lev Davidovich Landau (January 22, 1908 - April 1, 1968) was a prominent Soviet physicist of Jewish origin who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. His accomplishments include the co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics, the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of superfluidity, the theory of second order phase transitions, the Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity, …
- Gerardus 'T Hooft
Gerardus ("Gerard") 't Hooft (born July 5 1946, Den Helder) is a professor in theoretical physics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions". Asteroid 9491 Thooft is named in his honor; he has written a constitution for its future inhabitants. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1986.
- Ivar Giaever
Ivar Giaever (born April 5, 1929 in Bergen, Norway) is a physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian David Josephson for work in solid-state physics. Giaever is an institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and the president of Applied Biophysics.
- Sin-Itiro Tomonaga
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga or Shinichirō Tomonaga was a Japanese physicist, influential in the development of quantum electrodynamics, work for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
- Melvin Schwartz
Melvin Schwartz was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. He grew up in New York City in the Great Depression and went to the Bronx High School of Science. His interest in physics began there at the age of 12.
- Ernst Ruska
Ernst August Friedrich Ruska (December 25, 1906-May 27, 1988) was a German physicist. Ruska was born in Heidelberg. He was educated at the Technical University of Munich from 1925 to 1927 and then entered the Technical University of Berlin, where he posited that microscopes using electrons, with waves 1,000 shorter than those of light, could provide a more detailed picture of an object than a microscope utilizing light, …