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MIT Physics Department
The MIT Department of Physics has over 120 faculty members, is often cited as the largest physics department in the United States, and hosts top-ranked programs. It offers the Bachelor of Science, SB, Master of Science, SM, PhD, and ScD degrees. Fourteen alumni of the department and nine current or former faculty members (two of whom were also students at MIT) have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.The Department of Physics was born when MIT founder William Barton Rogers proposed in 1865 to bring their Mens et Manus philosophy to life by creating a new laboratory of physics and mechanics in another department’s back room. Academics Undergraduate academics There are two paths to earning a bachelor's degree (SB) in physics from MIT. The first, "Course 8 Focused Option", is for students intending to continue studying physics in graduate school. The track offers a rigorous education in various fields in fundamental physics including classical mechanics, classical and quantum mechani ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerome Isaac Friedman
Jerome Isaac Friedman (born March 28, 1930) is an American physicist. He is institute professor and professor of physics, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.", work which showed an internal structure for protons later known to be quarks. Friedman sits on the board of sponsors of the '' Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists''. Life and career Born in Chicago, Illinois to Lillian (''née'' Warsaw) and Selig Friedman, a sewing machine salesman, Friedman's Jewish parents emigrated to the U.S. from Russia. Jerome Friedman excelled in art but became interested in physics after reading a book on relativity written by Albert Einstein. He turned down a scholarship to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Robert Schrieffer
John Robert Schrieffer (; May 31, 1931 – July 27, 2019) was an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity. Life and career Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Louise (Anderson) and John Henry Schrieffer. His family moved in 1940 to Manhasset, New York, and then in 1947 to Eustis, Florida, where his father, a former pharmaceutical salesman, began a career in the citrus industry. In his Florida days, Schrieffer enjoyed playing with homemade rockets and ham radio, a hobby that sparked an interest in electrical engineering. After graduating from Eustis High School in 1949, Schrieffer was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where for two years he majored in electrical engineering before switching to physics in his junior year. He completed a bachelor's thesis on multiplets in heavy at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adam Riess
Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Riess has been at the center of a growing scientific debate about the so-called “Hubble tension” — a discrepancy between measurements of the universe’s expansion rate using nearby supernovae, and measurements inferred from the cosmic microwave background radiation using the Standard Model of cosmology. Riess’s data has prompted questions and further testing to determine if the Standard Model still adequately describes the universe. Family Riess was born to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Warre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Burton Richter
Burton Richter (March 22, 1931 – July 18, 2018) was an American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting for which they won Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976. This discovery was part of the November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999. Life and work A native of New York City, Richter was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and was raised in the Queens neighborhood of Far Rockaway. His parents were Fanny (Pollack) and Abraham Richter, a textile worker. He graduated from Far Rockaway High School, a school that also produced fellow laureates Baruch Samuel Blumberg and Richard Feynman. He attended Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, then continued on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1956. He then joined ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Daniel Phillips
William Daniel Phillips (born November 5, 1948) is an American physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. Biography Phillips was born on November 5, 1948, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to William Cornelius Phillips of Juniata, Pennsylvania, and Mary Catherine Savino of Ripacandida, Italy. He is of Italian descent on his mother's side and of Welsh descent on his father's side. His parents moved to Camp Hill (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) in 1959, where he attended high school and graduated valedictorian of his class in 1966. He graduated from Juniata College in 1970 ''summa cum laude''. After that he received his physics doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978, he joined National Bureau of Standards (currently NIST). In 1996, he received the Albert A. Michelson Medal from The Franklin Institute. Phillips' doctoral thesis concerned the magnetic moment of the proton in H2O. He later did some w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert B
The name Robert is an ancient Germanic given name, from Proto-Germanic "fame" and "bright" (''Hrōþiberhtaz''). Compare Old Dutch ''Robrecht'' and Old High German ''Hrodebert'' (a compound of ''Hrōþ, Hruod'' () "fame, glory, honour, praise, renown, godlike" and ''berht'' "bright, light, shining"). It is the second most frequently used given name of ancient Germanic origin.Reaney & Wilson, 1997. ''Dictionary of English Surnames''. Oxford University Press. It is also in use Robert (surname), as a surname. Another commonly used form of the name is Rupert (name), Rupert. After becoming widely used in Continental Europe, the name entered England in its Old French form ''Robert'', where an Old English cognate form (''Hrēodbēorht'', ''Hrodberht'', ''Hrēodbēorð'', ''Hrœdbœrð'', ''Hrœdberð'', ''Hrōðberχtŕ'') had existed before the Norman Conquest. The feminine version is Roberta (given name), Roberta. The Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish form is Roberto (given name), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American theoretical physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co-inventor of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which explains the confinement of quarks in mesons and baryons and forms a large part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces. Murray Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Life and education Gell-Mann was bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Feynman developed a pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams and is widely used. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal ''Physics World'', he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time. He assisted in the Manhatt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eric Allin Cornell
Eric Allin Cornell (born December 19, 1961) is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, was able to synthesize the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. For their efforts, Cornell, Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Biography Cornell was born in Palo Alto, California, where his parents were completing graduate degrees at nearby Stanford University. Two years later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT. Here he grew up with his younger brother and sister, with year-long stints in Berkeley, California, and Lisbon, Portugal, accompanying his father whilst on sabbatical. In Cambridge he attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. The year before his graduation he moved back to California with his mother and finished high school at San Francisco's Lowell High School, a local magnet school for academically talented students. After high school he enrolled at Stanford U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rainer Weiss
Rainer "Rai" Weiss ( , ; born September 29, 1932) is a German-American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitation, gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT and an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University, LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the Cosmic Background Explorer, COBE Science Working Group. In 2017, Weiss was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves". Weiss has helped realize a number of challenging experimental tests of fundamental physics. He is a member of the Fermilab Holometer experiment, which uses a 40m Michelson Interferometer, laser interferometer to measure properties of space and time at quantum scale and provide Planck-precision tests of quantum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Wilczek
Frank Anthony Wilczek ( or ; born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), distinguished professor at Arizona State University (ASU) during February and March and full professor at Stockholm University. Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction". In May 2022, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his "investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that has transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty." Early life and education Born in Mineola, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
