Nelson James Terrell (August 15, 1923–March 21, 2009) was an US physicist and scientist at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...

. James Terrell worked in relativity and

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the ...

. The

Terrell rotation Terrell rotation or the Terrell effect is the visual distortion that a passing object would appear to undergo, according to the special theory of relativity, if it were travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This behaviour was ...

, an image distortion of objects travelling near the

speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant exactly equal to ). It is exact because, by international agreement, a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time i ...

, is named after him.

Life

Nelson James Terrell Jr. was born in

Houston Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...

, Texas in 1923. James Terrell did his undergraduate studies

Rice University William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres. Rice University comp ...

. In 1945, he married Anne Elizabeth Pearson. Together, they had a daughter. From 1945 to 1947, the army sent Terrell to Japan. When he came back, he finished his PhD at Rice University in 1950. He worked on

nuclear fission Nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactiv ...

and the

theory of relativity The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated physics theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity, proposed and published in 1905 and 1915, respectively. Special relativity applies to all physical ph ...

. He worked as assistant professor at Western Reserve University, and later joined

in 1951. Terrell was member of the

International Astronomical Union The International Astronomical Union (IAU; , UAI) is an international non-governmental organization (INGO) with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach, education, and developmen ...

. He died in

Los Alamos, New Mexico Los Alamos (, meaning ''The Poplars'') is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as one of the development and creation places of the Nuclear weapon, atomic bomb—the primary objective of ...

in 2009.

Research

In 1957 he started publishing works on

length contraction Length contraction is the phenomenon that a moving object's length is measured to be shorter than its proper length, which is the length as measured in the object's own rest frame. It is also known as Lorentz contraction or Lorentz–FitzGerald ...

. He discovered that the appearance of objects looks rotated at large speed, as predicted by

special relativity In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory of the relationship between Spacetime, space and time. In Albert Einstein's 1905 paper, Annus Mirabilis papers#Special relativity, "On the Ele ...

. This is now known as the

or Terrell effect. In 1966, he studied

quasars A quasar ( ) is an extremely Luminosity, luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by accretion onto a supermassive black hole with a mass rangi ...

. He postulated that quasars were originally ejected from the center of galaxies. This conjecture was the matter of international debate. In the 1970s he worked on analysing the x-ray data of Cygnus X-1, a

black hole A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. Th ...

candidate, and worked on the x-ray data from the Vela B satellite. He produced a movie of the sky depicting dying stars, quasars, and black holes. He also worked on solving the diffraction problem of high intensity lasers.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Terrel, James 1923 births 2009 deaths 20th-century American physicists Astrophysicists Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel Rice University alumni