- 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.
- Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA, (born 8 January1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general.
- Michio Kaku
Dr. Michio Kaku is a Japanese American theoretical physicist, tenured professor, and co-founder of string field theory, a branch of superstring theory. He is a widely known popularizer of science, the host of two radio programs, and the author of numerous books.
- 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, …
- Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 - February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist, best known for his role as the director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons, at the secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. Known as "the father of the atomic bomb"," Oppenheimer lamented the weapon's killing power after it was used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- 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.
- Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (April 25, 1900 - December 15, 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted for his work on the theory of spin, and in particular the discovery of the exclusion principle, which underpins the structure of matter, and (as such) the whole of chemistry.
- Lisa Randall
Lisa Randall (born 18 June, 1962) is a leading theoretical physicist and expert on particle physics, string theory and cosmology. She works on several of the competing models of string theory in the quest to explain the fabric of reality, and was the first tenured woman in the Princeton University physics department and the first tenured female theoretical physicist at MIT and Harvard University.
- John Ellis
John Ellis is a British theoretical physicist born in 1946. He attended Cambridge University, and led the particle theory group at CERN for six years. He is best known for assisting Dimitri Nanopoulos in the unification of string theory with the Standard Model. He also invented the "penguin diagram", a type of Feynman diagram. Ellis is responsible for coining the term Theory of Everything (ToE) in an article published in the journal Nature in 1986.
- John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler (born July 9, 1911) is an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known as the coiner of the popular name of the well known space phenomenon, the black hole.
- Leonard Susskind
Leonard Susskind (born 1940) is the Felix Bloch professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University in the field of string theory and quantum field theory. Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory for his early contributions to the String Theory model of particle physics.
- Kip Thorne
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist, known for his prolific contributions in gravitation physics and astrophysics and for having trained a generation of scientists. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking, he is the current Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and one of the world’s leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
- Edward Witten
Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American mathematical physicist, Fields Medalist, and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is one of the world's leading researchers in string theory (as the founder of M-theory) and quantum field theory.
- 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
- Abdus Salam
Abdus Salam (January 29, 1926 at Santokdas, Sahiwal in Punjab - November 21, 1996 in Oxford, England) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work in Electro-Weak Theory which is the mathematical and conceptual synthesis of the Electromagnetic and Weak interactions, the latest stage in the effort to provide a unified description of the four fundamental forces of nature.
- 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".
- Sidney Coleman
Sidney Richard Coleman (b. 7 March 1937) is an eminent theoretical physicist who studied under Murray Gell-Mann, receiving his PhD from Caltech in 1962. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University and the author of the classic particle physics text "Aspects of Symmetry", which is a collection of lectures delivered at the International School for Subnuclear Physics in Erice, Sicily. Some of his best known works are Coleman-Mandula theorem and Coleman theorem.
- Luboš Motl
Lubos Motl, in Czech Luboš Motl is a Czech theoretical physicist who works on string theory and conceptual problems of quantum gravity. Motl was born in Plzeň. He received his master degree from the Charles University in Prague, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Rutgers University and has been a Harvard Junior Fellow (2001-2004) and assistant professor (2004-2007) at Harvard University.
- Jack Sarfatti
Jack Sarfatti (born September 14, 1939) is an American theoretical physicist and the author of a number of popular works on quantum physics and consciousness. He is known for his iconoclastic ideas, and is interested in what he sees as the breakdown of the paradigm that posits science and the humanities as separate disciplines, …
- John Pendry
Professor Sir John Brian Pendry FRS BA MA PhD FInstP, (born 1944), is an English theoretical physicist. Professor Pendry is well known for his work on the structure of surfaces and their interaction with electrons and photons. He has published over 200 scientific papers. He has published on subjects such as surface plasmons and negative refractive index materials. From 1975-1981 he worked at the Daresbury Laboratory, Cheshire.
- Klaus Fuchs
Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (December 29, 1911 - January 28, 1988) was a German-born theoretical physicist and atomic spy who was convicted of surreptitiously supplying information on the British and American atomic bomb research to the USSR during, and shortly after, World War II. Fuchs was an extremely competent scientist, …
- John Preskill
John Phillip Preskill (born 19 January, 1953) is an American theoretical physicist and a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Preskill was born in Highland Park, Illinois. After earning an B.A. in physics at Princeton University, summa cum laude, in 1975, he received his Ph.D. in the same subject from Harvard University in 1980. His graduate advisor at Harvard was Steven Weinberg. Many of his students are well-known physicists.
- Hideki Yukawa
Hideki Yukawa FRSE (湯川 秀樹, January 23, 1907 - September 8, 1981) was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese to win the Nobel prize. Yukawa was born in Tokyo, on January 23, 1907. In 1929, after receiving his degree from Kyoto Imperial University he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. After graduation, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles.
- Gabriele Veneziano
Gabriele Veneziano (b. 1942) is a theoretical physicist and one of the fathers of string theory. Of Italian origin, he was born in 1942 in Florence. While he worked at CERN in 1968, he discovered that the Euler Beta function used as a scattering amplitude, the so-called Veneziano amplitude, has many features that are useful to explain physical properties of strongly interacting particles.
- Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg (born October 4 1916 in Moscow) is a Russian (formerly Soviet) theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the successor to Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of Academy's physics institute (FIAN).
- Lars Onsager
Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 - October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian-American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
- Otto Stern
Otto Stern was a German physicist and Nobel laureate. Stern was born in Sohrau (Żory) in the German Empire's Kingdom of Prussia (now in Poland) and studied at Breslau (Wrocław) in Lower Silesia. Stern completed his studies at the University of Breslau in 1912 with a doctor's degree in physical chemistry. He then followed Albert Einstein to Charles University in Prague and in later to ETH Zurich.
- Jean Bricmont
Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist and a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. He works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations. He is mostly known to the non-academic audience for co-authoring "Fashionable Nonsense" (also known as "Intellectual Impostures") with Alan Sokal. Jean Bricmont also collaborates with activist Noam Chomsky and campaigns on a variety of progressive causes.
- Per Bak
Per Bak (December 8 1948 - October 16 2002) was a Danish theoretical physicist, attributed with the development of the concept of self-organized criticality.
- Walter Kohn
Walter Kohn (born March 9,1923 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He was awarded, with John A. Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of the density functional theory, …
- Bryce Dewitt
Bryce Seligman DeWitt (January 8,1923 - September 23, 2004) was a theoretical physicist best known for formulating canonical quantum gravity, one of the first approaches to quantizing general relativity; for formulating the Wheeler-deWitt equation for the wavefunction of the universe with John Archibald Wheeler; and for advancing the formulation of the Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
- Brandon Carter
Brandon Carter is an Australian theoretical physicist, best known for his work on the properties of black holes and for being the first to name and employ the anthropic principle in its contemporary form. He is a researcher at the Meudon campus of the Laboratoire de l’Univers ses Théories, part of the CNRS. After studying at Cambridge under Dennis Sciama, Carter made several important contributions to the golden age of general relativity.
- David Lindley
David Lindley (born 1956) is a theoretical physicist and author. He has worked at Cambridge University and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and been an editor at "Nature", "Science", and "Science News". Lindley is known for writing entertaining scientific texts that show not only great knowledge of physics, but also a wit and understanding of what the "layman" can grasp.
- Miguel Alcubierre
Miguel Alcubierre is a Mexican theoretical physicist. Born in Mexico City, he took a degree in physics, and a Master of Science in theoretical physics at the School of Science of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). At the end of 1990 he moved to Wales to attend graduate school at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He received his Ph.D. in the area of Numerical relativity in 1994.
- Sidney Drell
Sidney Drell is professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. James Goodby was an adviser to President Clinton on the CTBT and is diplomat-in-residence at Stanford University. Raymond Jeanloz is a professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California at Berkeley. Robert Peurifoy was a vice president of Sandia National Laboratories.
- Gary Gibbons
Gary William Gibbons (b. 1 July, 1946), FRS, is a British theoretical physicist. Gibbons studied in Cambridge, where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of Dennis Sciama. When Sciama moved to Oxford, he became a student of Stephen Hawking's, obtaining his PhD from Cambridge in 1973. Apart from a stay at the Max Planck Institute in Munich in the 1970s he has remained in Cambridge throughout his career, becoming a full professor in 1997, …
- Abraham
Abraham (Avi) Loeb is an American/Israeli theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. He is currently a professor of astronomy and the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at Harvard University. Loeb was born in Israel in 1962 and took part in the national Talpiot program before receiving a graduate degree in Plasma Physics at age 24 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
- Elaine Pagels
Elaine Pagels, is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is best known for her studies and writing on the gnostic gospels.
- Andrew Strominger
Andrew Strominger is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory and son of Jack L. Strominger. He is currently a professor at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Society of Fellows. He got his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1977, and his Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 under the supervision of Roman Jackiw.
- David Pines
David Pines (June 8th, 1924-) is is the Founding Director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) and the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (I2CAM) (respectively, US wide and international institutions dedicated to research in and the understanding of emergent phenomena --http://icam-i2cam.org), Distinguished Professor of Physics, U C Davis, …