List of Jewish American physicists
Encyclopedia
This is a list of famous Jewish American physicists. For other famous Jewish Americans, see List of Jewish Americans.
- Ralph Alpher, background radiation, nucleosynthesis
- John Bahcall, astrophysicist
- Hans BetheHans BetheHans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...
, nuclear physicist, Nobel PrizeNobel Prize in PhysicsThe Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
(1967) (Jewish mother) - Felix BlochFelix BlochFelix Bloch was a Swiss physicist, working mainly in the U.S.-Life and work:Bloch was born in Zürich, Switzerland to Jewish parents Gustav and Agnes Bloch. He was educated there and at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, also in Zürich. Initially studying engineering he soon changed to physics...
, nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize (1952) (naturalized citizen) - David BohmDavid BohmDavid Joseph Bohm FRS was an American-born British quantum physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy, neuropsychology, and the Manhattan Project.-Youth and college:...
, quantum physicist, philosopher of science - Gregory BreitGregory BreitGregory Breit was a Russian-born American physicist and professor at universities in New York, Wisconsin, Yale, and Buffalo...
, physicist - Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
(German) theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize (1921) (naturalized citizen) - Paul Sophus EpsteinPaul Sophus EpsteinPaul Sophus Epstein was a Russian-American mathematical physicist...
, theoretical physicist, quantum mechanics - Herman FeshbachHerman FeshbachHerman Feshbach was an American physicist. He was an Institute Professor Emeritus of physics at MIT. Feshbach is best known for Feshbach resonance and for writing, with Philip M...
, nuclear physicist - Richard P. Feynman, physicist, Nobel Prize (1965) (though he always refused to appear in lists such as this one and other lists or books that classified people by race )
- David FinkelsteinDavid FinkelsteinDavid Ritz Finkelstein is currently an emeritus professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Finkelstein obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. From 1964 to 1976, he was professor of physics at Yeshiva University.In 1958 Charles W...
, physicist - James FranckJames FranckJames Franck was a German Jewish physicist and Nobel laureate.-Biography:Franck was born to Jacob Franck and Rebecca Nachum Drucker. Franck completed his Ph.D...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1925) - Edward FredkinEdward FredkinEdward Fredkin is an early pioneer of digital physics. In recent work, he uses the term digital philosophy . His primary contributions include his work on reversible computing and cellular automata...
, digital physicist - Jerome Friedman, physicist, Nobel Prize (1990)
- Murray Gell-MannMurray Gell-MannMurray Gell-Mann is an American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles...
, quarks, Nobel Prize (1969) - Sheldon Glashow, physicist, Nobel Prize (1979)
- Donald A. GlaserDonald A. GlaserDonald Arthur Glaser , is an American physicist, neurobiologist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his invention of the Bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics....
, bubble chamber, Nobel Prize (1960) - Roy Glauber, physicist, Nobel Prize (2005)
- Samuel Goudsmit, electron spin
- Brian GreeneBrian GreeneBrian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds...
, string theorist - Herbert GoldsteinHerbert GoldsteinHerbert Goldstein was an American physicist and the author of the standard graduate textbook Classical Mechanics. He received a B.S. from City College of New York in 1940 and a Ph.D...
, Columbia physicist, author of standard textbook on classical mechanics. - David GrossDavid GrossDavid Jonathan Gross is an American particle physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is currently the director and holder of the Frederick W...
, string theorist, Nobel Prize (2004) - Alan GuthAlan GuthAlan Harvey Guth is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory...
, cosmic inflation - Eugene GuthEugene GuthEugene Guth was an American physicist who made contributions to polymer physics and to nuclear and solid state physics. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics by the University of Vienna in 1928...
, polymer physics, nuclear physics, solid state physics - Robert HermanRobert HermanRobert Herman was a United States scientist, best known for his work with Ralph Alpher in 1948-50, on estimating the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang explosion....
, cosmology, background radiation, operations research - Robert HofstadterRobert HofstadterRobert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons."-Biography :Born in New York City, he entered City...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1961) - Herman KahnHerman KahnHerman Kahn was one of the preeminent futurists of the latter third of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s he predicted the rise of Japan as a major world power. He was a founder of the Hudson Institute think tank and originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems...
, nuclear physicist - Theodore von KármánTheodore von KarmanTheodore von Kármán was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization...
, aeronautical engineer - Daniel KleppnerDaniel KleppnerDaniel Kleppner, born 1932, is the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT and co-director of the . He is the winner of the 2005 Wolf Prize in Physics , and the 2007 . Prof. Kleppner has also been awarded the National Medal of Science . Together with Robert J. Kolenkow, he authored a...
, atomic research - Walter KohnWalter KohnWalter Kohn is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist.He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1998) - Rudolf KompfnerRudolf KompfnerRudolf Kompfner was an Austrian-born engineer and physicist, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube .Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents...
, engineer and physicist - Cornelius LanczosCornelius LanczosCornelius Lanczos Löwy Kornél was a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician and physicist, who was born on February 2, 1893, and died on June 25, 1974....
, mathematical physicist http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Lanczos.html - Rolf LandauerRolf LandauerRolf William Landauer was an IBM physicist who in 1961 argued that when information is lost in an irreversible circuit, the information becomes entropy and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat...
, physicist, information theory - Leon M. LedermanLeon M. LedermanLeon Max Lederman is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work with neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, USA...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1988) - David Morris Lee, superfluidity, Nobel Prize (1996)
- Fritz LondonFritz LondonFritz Wolfgang London was a German theoretical physicist. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces are today considered classic and are discussed in standard textbooks of physical chemistry.With his brother Heinz, he made a significant...
, quantum chemistry - Theodore Maiman, first operable laser
- Albert Michelson, speed of light, Nobel Prize (1907)
- Ben Roy MottelsonBen Roy MottelsonBenjamin Roy Mottelson is an American-born Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei....
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1975) - Frank OppenheimerFrank OppenheimerFrank Friedman Oppenheimer was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, was a target of McCarthyism, and was later the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He was the younger brother of J...
, nuclear physicist (brother of Robert) - Robert OppenheimerRobert OppenheimerJulius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first...
, nuclear physicist (brother of Frank) - Douglas D. OsheroffDouglas D. OsheroffDouglas Dean Osheroff is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C...
, superfluidity, Nobel Prize (1996) - Jeremiah P. OstrikerJeremiah P. OstrikerJeremiah Paul Ostriker is an astrophysicist at Princeton University. He received his B.A. from Harvard, his Ph.D at the University of Chicago, and then carried out post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. From 1971 to 1995, Ostriker was a professor at Princeton, and served as Provost...
, astrophysicist - Abraham PaisAbraham PaisAbraham Pais was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II...
, historian of science - Wolfgang PauliWolfgang PauliWolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after being nominated by Albert Einstein, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or...
, nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize (1945) (Jewish father, half-Jewish mother) (naturalized citizen) - Arno Allan PenziasArno Allan PenziasArno Allan Penzias is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.-Early life and education:Penzias was born in Munich, Germany. At age six he was among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation...
, background radiation, Nobel Prize (1978) - Martin Lewis PerlMartin Lewis PerlMartin Lewis Perl is an American physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton.His parents were Jewish emigrants to the US from the Polish area of Russia....
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1995) - H. David Politzer, physicist, Nobel Prize (2004)
- Martin PopeMartin PopeMartin Pope is a physical chemist and professor emeritus at New York University.His discoveries of ohmic contacts and research in the fields of organic insulators and semiconductors led to techniques enabling organic semiconductors to carry relatively large currents, and to convert electricity...
, physical chemist, Davy MedalDavy MedalThe Davy Medal is awarded by the Royal Society of London "for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry". Named after Humphry Davy, the medal is awarded with a gift of £1000. The medal was first awarded in 1877 to Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff "for...
(2006) - Isidor Isaac RabiIsidor Isaac RabiIsidor Isaac Rabi was a Galician-born American physicist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.-Early years:...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1944) (naturalized citizen) - Simon RamoSimon RamoSimon "Si" Ramo is an American physicist, engineer, and business leader. He led development of microwave and missile technology and is sometimes known as the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile...
, physicist, engineer - Mark G. RaizenMark G. RaizenMark George Raizen is a physicist who conducts experiments on quantum optics and atom optics.-Birth and Education:Raizen was born in New York City where generations of his family resided since the 1840s. While he comes from a long line of medical doctors, dating back to the Civil War, Raizen's life...
, physicist, quantum physics - Sidney RednerSidney RednerSidney Redner is a Canadian-born physicist and professor of physics at Boston University. Redner has published over 200 journal articles, authored a book titled A Guide to First-Passage Processes , and coauthored a book titled A Kinetic View of Statistical Physics with Pavel L. Krapivsky and Eli...
, statistical physics - Frederick ReinesFrederick ReinesFrederick 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...
, neutrino experiment, Nobel Prize (1995) - Burton RichterBurton RichterBurton Richter is a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory team led by Samuel Ting. This discovery was part of the so-called November Revolution of particle...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1976) - Carl SaganCarl SaganCarl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...
, astronomer & science popularizer - Arthur Schawlow, laser spectroscopy, Nobel Prize (1981) (Jewish father)
- Melvin SchwartzMelvin SchwartzMelvin 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...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1988) - Julian SchwingerJulian SchwingerJulian Seymour Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.Schwinger is recognized as one of the...
, quantum physicist, Nobel Prize (1965) - Emilio G. SegrèEmilio G. SegrèEmilio Gino Segrè was an Italian-born, naturalized American, physicist and Nobel laureate in physics, who with Owen Chamberlain, discovered antiprotons, a sub-atomic antiparticle.-Biography:...
, anti-proton, Nobel Prize (1959) (naturalized citizen) - Lee SmolinLee SmolinLee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. He is married to Dina Graser, a communications lawyer in Toronto. His brother is David M...
, loop quantum gravity - Alan SokalAlan SokalAlan David Sokal is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in...
, Sokal AffairSokal AffairThe Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies... - H. Eugene StanleyH. Eugene StanleyHarry Eugene Stanley is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science...
, econophysicsEconophysicsEconophysics is an interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics...
, phase transitions, critical phenomenaCritical phenomenaIn physics, critical phenomena is the collective name associated with thephysics of critical points. Most of them stem from the divergence of thecorrelation length, but also the dynamics slows down... - Jack SteinbergerJack SteinbergerJack Steinberger is a German-American physicist currently residing near Geneva, Switzerland. He co-discovered the muon neutrino, along with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for which they were given the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.-Life:...
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1988) - Otto SternOtto SternOtto Stern was a German physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.-Biography:Stern was born in Sohrau, now Żory in the German Empire's Kingdom of Prussia and studied at Breslau, now Wrocław in Lower Silesia....
, physicist, Nobel Prize (1943) - Andrew StromingerAndrew StromingerAndrew Eben 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...
, string theory - Leonard SusskindLeonard SusskindLeonard Susskind is the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology...
, string theory (Jewish father) - Leó SzilárdLeó SzilárdLeó Szilárd was an Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb...
, nuclear physicist (naturalized citizen) - Edward TellerEdward TellerEdward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...
, nuclear physicist - Steven WeinbergSteven WeinbergSteven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....
, electroweak force, Nobel Prize (1979) - Victor Frederick WeisskopfVictor Frederick WeisskopfVictor Frederick Weisskopf was an Austrian-born Jewish American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr...
(1908–2002) physicist. During World War II, he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, and later campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons - Eugene Wigner, quantum physicist, Nobel Prize (1963)
- Edward WittenEdward WittenEdward Witten is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study....
, mathematical physicist, Fields Medal (1990), founder of M-TheoryM-theoryIn theoretical physics, M-theory is an extension of string theory in which 11 dimensions are identified. Because the dimensionality exceeds that of superstring theories in 10 dimensions, proponents believe that the 11-dimensional theory unites all five string theories...
, only physicist to win Fields medal, and currently the driving force behind theoretical/mathematical physics. - George ZweigGeorge ZweigGeorge Zweig was originally trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman and later turned his attention to neurobiology...
, quarks
See also
- List of members of the National Academy of Sciences
- List of National Medal of Science winners