James Prescott Joule experimented with engines, electricity and heat throughout his life. Joule's findings resulted in his development of the mechanical theory of heat and Joule's law, which quantitatively describes the rate at which...

Karl Jansky discovered extraterrestrial radio waves while investigating possible sources of interference in shortwave radio communications across the Atlantic for Bell Laboratories, and is often known as the father of radio astronomy....

Siegmund Loewe was a German engineer and businessman that developed vacuum tube forerunners of the modern integrated circuit. He pioneered both radio and television broadcasting, and the company he established with his brother, David...

Austrian-born scientist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli made numerous important contributions to twentieth-century theoretical physics, including explaining the Zeeman effect, first postulating the existence of the neutrino, and developing what has...

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist who first observed the phenomenon of superconductivity while carrying out pioneering work in the field of cryogenics. An important step on the way to this discovery was his success in...

Georg Simon Ohm had humble roots and struggled financially throughout most of his life, but the German physicist is well known today for his formulation of a law, termed Ohm's law, describing the mathematical relationship between...

In their search for new superconductors, Swiss theoretical physicist Karl Alexander Muller and his young colleague, J. Georg Bednorz, abandoned the metal alloys typically used in superconductivity research in favor of a class of oxides...

James Clerk Maxwell was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. His theoretical work on electromagnetism and light largely determined the direction that physics would take in the early twentieth century. Indeed,...

Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser. Ironically, Maiman's first paper announcing this momentous achievement, which many other scientists had been racing to complete themselves, was rejected. Since then, however, lasers...

In a career that lasted seven decades, Max Planck achieved an enduring legacy with groundbreaking discoveries involving the relationship between heat and energy, but he is most remembered as the founder of the "quantum theory."

Awarded more than 100 patents over the course of his lifetime, Nikola Tesla was a man of considerable genius and vision. He was reportedly born at exactly midnight during an electrical storm, an intriguing beginning for a man who would...

In 1866, the research of Werner von Siemens would lead to his discovery of the dynamo electric principle that paved the way for the large-scale generation of electricity through mechanical means.

Find out about William Bradford Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the first point-contact transistor and the invention of the more advanced junction transistor. His later research focused on developing...

Claude Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer whose work underlies modern information theory and helped instigate the digital revolution. He was the first person to recognize how Boolean algebra could be used to great...

Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger used the mathematical process of renormalization to rid the quantum field theory developed by Paul Dirac of serious incongruities with experimental observations that had nearly prompted the...

While still in graduate school, John Robert Schrieffer developed with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper a theoretical explanation of superconductivity that garnered the trio the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. The BCS theory (the acronym...

Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer co-invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a non-optical instrument that allows the observation of individual atoms in three dimensions, with Gerd Binnig. The achievement garnered the pair half...

Joseph John Thomson, better known as J. J. Thomson, was a British physicist who first theorized and offered experimental evidence that the atom was a divisible entity rather than the basic unit of matter, as was widely believed at the...

Carl Edwin Wieman is one of three physicists credited with the discovery of a fifth phase of matter, for which he was awarded a share of the prestigious Nobel Prize in 2001. The recognition capped a distinguished career that began deep...

The Scottish instrument maker and inventor James Watt had a tremendous impact on the shape of modern society. His improvements to the steam engine were a significant factor in the Industrial Revolution, and when the Watt engine was...

Japanese theoretical physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga resolved key problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) developed by Paul Dirac in the late 1920s through the use of a mathematical technique he referred to as...

From the Stone Age to today, the search is constantly underway for better, more efficient ways to cook food. Reflecting many of the advances in science and technology, the electric range has become a popular choice for homes and businesses.

Although he didn't start studying physics until he retired from the clock-making business at age 30, French native Jean Peltier made immense contributions to science that still reverberate today. Even with the primitive tools available...

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb invented a device, dubbed the torsion balance, that allowed him to measure very small charges and experimentally estimate the force of attraction or repulsion between two charged bodies. The data he obtained...