| .American who discovered the positron, or anti-electron (1932), won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1936, and during 1936-38, discovered the existence of mesons in cosmic rays | Carl David Anderson |
| French scientist who developed the principles of electromagnetism using electric currents (1820); the ampere, a unit of intensity of an electric current is named in his honor, and he formulated Ampere’s law describing the contribution of a current element to magnetic induction | André Marie Ampère |
| Greek who devised Archimedes’ screw, a device for raising water, and discovered Archimedes’ principle concerning buoyancy; he wrote On the Sphere and Cylinder | Archimedes |
| Greek who wrote Physics (8 books) and, using deduction and logic, formed theories concerning change in many areas of physics | Aristotle |
| American who with Walter Brattain and William Shockley shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956 for their research on semiconductors and the development of the transistor; Bardeen also shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in physics, this time with Leon N. Cooper and John P. Schrieffer for their work on the theory of superconductivity | John Bardeen |
| French scientist who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 with Pierre and Marie Curie for the discovery of natural radioactivity | Antoine Henri Becquerel |
| Swiss scientist who developed the theory of the pressure of gases on the walls of a container, wrote Hydrodynamica (1738), and is known for Bernoulli’s law (Principle) on pressure and liquids and gases | Daniel Bernoulli |
| Danish winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922 for his investigation of atomic structure and radiation; he is the founder of the modern quantum theory of matter and modern theory of atomic and molecular structure | Niels Henrik David Bohr |
| English scientist who with his son Sir W. Lawrence Bragg used x-rays to determine the structure of crystals for which they won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1915 | Sir William Bragg |
| French founder of wave mechanics who received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1929 for the discovery of the wave-like nature of electrons | Louis Victor de Broglie |
| Swedish scientist who developed a temperature scale (1742) which placed the boiling point at 0° and the freezing point at 100° (later reversed) | Anders Celsius |
| English scientist who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1935 for his discovery of the neutron (1932) | Sir James Chadwick |
| American who helped prove quantum theory with the discovery that X-rays act as atomic particles (the Compton effect), for which he shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927 with Charles Wilson | Arthur Holly Compton |
| .French scientist who formulated Coulomb’s law, which states that the force of attraction between two charged particles is directly proportional to the product of their charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them; a unit for the quantity of electricity, the coulomb, was named in his honor | Charles Augustin de Coulomb |
| French scientists who pioneered work in radioactivity and discovered radium and polonium in 1898; they shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 with Henri Becquerel and are known for the Curie point, the temperature at which ferromagnetic substances lose their magnetism, and for Curie’s law | Marie (Sklodowska) et Pierre Curie |
| Austrian who discovered the Doppler effect (1842), that the apparent change in the frequency of sound, light, or radio waves is caused by a change in the distance between the source of the wave and receiver | Christian Johann Doppler |
| German-born American who developed his theory of relativity (1905), was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect, and developed a unified field theory (1929) | Albert Einstein |
| German-Dutch scientist who invented the first practical mercury thermometer (1714) and devised the Fahrenheit temperature scale (c. 1720) in which the melting point of ice is 32° and the boiling point of water is 212° | Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit |
| English scientist who discovered electromagnetic induction (1831) and formulated the laws of electrolysis; the farad, a unit of capacitance, and faraday, a unit of electricity, were named in his honor | Michael Faraday |
| Italian-born American who split the atom in nuclear fission (1934) and received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938 for his discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons; he produced the first chain reaction, and helped develop the atomic bomb in the 1940s | Enrico Fermi |
| American who won (with Julian S. Schwinger and Sinitiro Tomonaga) the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 for research in quantum electrodynamics | Richard Feynman |
| .French scientist who demonstrated the rotation of the Earth with Foucault’s pendulum (1851), built the first gyroscope (1852), and proved that the velocity of light is greater in the air than in the water; the eddy current, or Foucault current, is named after him | Jean Bernard Léon Foucault |
| Italian who demonstrated from the Leaning Tower of Pisa that bodies of different weights accelerate uniformly (1589) and discovered the law of the pendulum (1584); he also formed the 3 laws of motion later stated by Isaac Newton and wrote Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences (1636) | Galileo Galilei |
| German who developed the Geiger counter (c. 1911) with Ernest Rutherford | Hans Wilhelm Geiger |
| American who proposed the eightfold way, a theoretical system of classifying elementary nuclear particles and their interactions, for which he received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1969 | Murray Gell-Mann |
| American who founded the science of chemical thermodynamics and contributed his famous phase rule, which is applicable to all systems of equilibrium | Josiah Willard Gibbs |
| American “Father of Modern Rocketry and Space Flight” who launched the first successful liquid-fueled rocket (1926); the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is named in his honor | Robert Hutchings Goddard |
| German who received the 1932 Nobel Prize for physics for his work in the development of quantum mechanics; famous for his “uncertainty principle,” which holds that the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be precisely determined at the same time, a principle also called the “principle of indeterminacy” | Werner Heisenberg |
| American who invented the electric relay (1835) and, in effect, invented the telegraph but his work was not patented and Morse received credit; he discovered the principle of induction and a unit of induction, the henry, is named after him | Joseph Henry |
| German who discovered electromagnetic radio waves, called Hertzian waves (1887); a hertz, a unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second, is named in his honor | Heinrich Rudolph Hertz |
| Dutch scientist who discovered the wave theory of light (1678), refined the value of pi, and invented a pendulum clock (1657) | Christiaan Huygens |
| English scientist who formulated Joule’s law on the relationship between heat and mechanical energy; the unit of work energy, the joule, is named in his honor | James Prescott Joule |
| German who discovered a fundamental law of electromagnetic radiation (1859) and used a spectroscope to discover cesium (1860) | Gustav Robert Kirchovv |
| American inventor of the cyclotron (1930), for which he won the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics | Ernest Orlando Lawrence |
| Dutch scientist who developed the electron theory and shared with Pieter Zeeman the 1902 Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of the phenomena called the Zeeman effect (the effects of magnetism on light) | Hendrick Antoon Lorentz |
| Scottish scientist who developed the mathematical explanation of the electromagnetic theory of light and whose treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) is the foundation of present-day electromagnetic theory | James Clerk Maxwell |
| Austrian who established the study of the philosophy of sciences and is known for his Mach number, a unit relating speed to the velocity of sound (1887) | Ernest Mach |
| Italian “Father of Wireless Telegraphy” who founded his wireless telegraph company in 1897 and shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909 with Carl Ferdinand Braun (German) for the development of wireless telegraphy | Marchese Guglielmo Marconi |
| Austrian who co-discovered protactinium (1917) with Otto Hahn and developed the theory of fission energy (1939), which helped develop the atomic bomb | Lise Meitner |
| English scientist who conceived of the theory of universal gravitation in Principia (1687) supposedly after seeing an apple fall in his garden, formulated 3 laws of motion, and laid the foundation for the modern study of optics | Sir Isaac Newton |
| Danish scientist who discovered that magnetic fields surround any wire containing electricity (1819), founded the science of electromagnetism (1820), and was thus the first to establish the connection between magnetism and electricity; a unit of magnetic field intensity, the oersted, is named in his honor | Hans Christian Oersted |
| German who discovered Ohm’s law, that the steady current through any portion of an electric current is directly proportional to the applied electromotive force | Georg Simon Ohm |
| American “Father of the Atomic Bomb” who directed the construction of the first atomic bomb (1943-1945) as part of the Manhattan Project | J. Robert Oppenheimer |
| German who developed the quantum theory of energy (1900), for which he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918; he is also known for Planck’s constant | Max Planck |
| French scientist who developed the Reaumur scale with a freezing point of water at 0° and a boiling point at 80° | René Antoine de Réaumur |
| German who discovered X-rays (1895), for which he was awarded in 1901 the first Nobel Prize for physics | Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen |
| British “Father of Nuclear Physics” because he formulated the first explanation of radioactivity; he is best known for his description of the nuclear structure of the atom (1911) | Ernest Rutherford |
| Russian “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb” who won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1975 | Andrey D. Sakharov |
| American “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb” (1952) who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb | Edward Teller |
| English-born American who stated that heat was not a substance of a body but the result of the motion of the particles in that substance | Sir Benjamin Thompson |
| English scientist who discovered the electron in 1897 and won the 1906 Nobel Prize for physics for the study of the conduction of electricity by gases. | Sir Joseph John Thomson |
| Italian who developed the mercury barometer (1643) and improved the telescope; a unit of pressure, the torr, is named for him | Evangelista Torricelli |
| American who discovered the Van Allen belts (1958), two zones of electrically charged particles that surround the earth; he confirmed his belief of high-energy radiation in nearby space by means of a counter aboard Explorer IV | James Alfred Van Allen |
| Italian who invented the voltaic pile, an early type of electric battery (1800); an electromagnetic unit, the volt, is named in his honor (1881) | Alessandro Volta |