American Philosophical Society
Member History

Results:  128 ItemsModify Search | New Search
Page: Prev  1 2 3 4 5   ...  NextReset Page
Residency
International (26)
Resident (100)
Subdivision
106. Physics[X]
21Name:  Dr. John Clarke
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
John Clarke has led in the understanding and the development of the SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) and exploration of this high sensitivity device for fundamental studies and applications. He has explored and demonstrated how this device can be used for measurements with a sensitivity up to the quantum mechanical limit. His studies have addressed the sources of 1/f noise, the limits of quantum computing, and the applications of SQUIDs for geological exploration and medical imaging. Clarke has co-authored the "handbook" of SQUID applications for high sensitivity electromagnetic measurements in a wide variety of fields and is universally known for this work.
 
22Name:  Dr. Marvin L. Cohen
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2003
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1935
   
 
Marvin Cohen created and applied a quantum theory for explaining and predicting properties of materials. His approach is used worldwide, and it is referred to as "the standard model of solids." The theoretical tools he developed and his insightful applications have formed the basis for much of our understanding of semiconductors and nanoscience. Dr. Cohen is a person of broad experience and influence. He has served as president of the American Physical Society and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently University Professor of Physics and Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, since 1966. His many honors include the Oliver E. Buckley Prize for Solid State Physics (1979); the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (1994); the National Medal of Science (2002); the Forsight Institute Richard P. Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (2003); the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum (2007); and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute (2017). Dr. Cohen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1980) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1993) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1997).
 
23Name:  Dr. Leon N Cooper
 Institution:  Brown University & Institute for Brain and Neural Systems
 Year Elected:  1973
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1930
   
 
Winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics, Leon Cooper is known for his role in developing the BCS theory of superconductivity and for the concept of Cooper electron pairs that bears his name. Dr. Cooper received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1954 and taught at the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Illinois and Ohio State University before moving to Brown University in 1958. At present he is Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown and Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. His research at Brown focuses primarily on neural networks (architecture, learning rules, real world applications; biological basis of memory and learning; visual cortex: comparison of theory and experiment, mean field theories and foundations of the Quantum Theory). Dr. Cooper is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the Natural Academy of Sciences, among other distinctions.
 
24Name:  Dr. James Watson Cronin
 Institution:  University of Chicago
 Year Elected:  1999
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1931
 Death Date:  August 25, 2016
   
 
James Watson Cronin received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was an assistant physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory for three years before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 1955. In 1971 he became a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career. In 1980, James Cronin and Val Fitch were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering a violation of the laws of symmetry in connection with the K-mesons produced at the Brookhaven proton accelerator. Dr. Cronin led the most ambitious international project for detecting the highest energy cosmic rays. The Pierre Auger Project called for the construction of a pair of 3,000 sq. km. arrays, one in Utah, the other on the high desert of Argentina. Comprised of 3,200 large Cerenkov detectors, the array will be capable of sensing cosmic rays in an entirely new and exciting energy regime. Dr. Cronin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1999.
 
25Name:  Dr. Jean Dalibard
 Institution:  Collège de France
 Year Elected:  2018
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1958
   
 
Jean Dalibard was educated at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1986 with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. He worked at the French Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) for the first part of his carrier, before joining Collège de France in 2012 where he holds the chair Matter and Radiation. He has also been a Professor at Ecole polytechnique for more than 20 years. Dalibard’s scientific work is concerned with atomic physics and optics, more specifically with the control of the motion of atoms with light. The starting point of this research field is quite paradoxical: by shining laser beams on a gas, it is possible to cool it to extremely low temperatures, less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Such a low temperature can give rise to novel states of matter whose behavior, governed by Quantum Mechanics, is radically different from a normal fluid. Together with Cohen-Tannoudji, Dalibard contributed to the understanding of the mechanisms at the origin of this phenomenon, working notably on Sisyphus cooling and on the magneto-optical trap. Later, Dalibard and his team studied experimentally the properties of these gases when they are set in rotation, and they could observe the nucleation of a lattice of quantized vortices resulting from this circular motion. During the last decade, his research has been focused on the "physics of Flatland", i.e. the specific properties of a fluid when it is constrained to move only in a plane instead of the usual three-dimensional space. The long-term goal of his research is to develop cold atom setups that can emulate other physical systems that are yet poorly understood - in condensed matter physics for example - in order to bring experimental answers to important pending questions. Jean Dalibard has received several awards, notably the Davisson-Germer Prize from the American Physical Society, the Max Born award from the Americal Physical Society and the Prix Jean Ricard form the French Physical Society. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, of the European Academy of Science, the Academia Europaea, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been a visiting scientist in a number of places outside France, notably NIST Gaithersburg and Cambridge University in the UK.
 
26Name:  Dr. Carl David Anderson
 Institution:  California Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  1938
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1905
 Death Date:  1/11/91
   
27Name:  Dr. Robert H. Dicke
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  1978
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1916
 Death Date:  3/4/97
   
28Name:  Dr. Robbert Dijkgraaf
 Institution:  Government of The Netherlands
 Year Elected:  2013
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study and Leon Levy Professor since July 2012, is a mathematical physicist who has made significant contributions to string theory and the advancement of science education. His research focuses on the interface between mathematics and particle physics. In addition to finding surprising and deep connections between matrix models, topological string theory, and supersymmetric quantum field theory, Dijkgraaf has developed precise formulas for the counting of bound states that explain the entropy of certain black holes. For his contributions to science, Dijkgraaf was awarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands, in 2003, and was named a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2012. Past President (2008-12) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Co-Chair of the InterAcademy Council (since 2009), Dijkgraaf is a distinguished public policy adviser and passionate advocate for science and the arts. Many of his activities - which have included frequent appearances on Dutch television, a monthly newspaper column in NRC Handelsblad, several books for general audiences, and the launch of the science education website Proefjes.nl - are at the interface between science and society.
 
29Name:  Dr. Andrei D. Sakharov
 Year Elected:  1978
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1921
 Death Date:  12/14/89
   
30Name:  Dr. Sidney Drell
 Institution:  Stanford University
 Year Elected:  1987
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1926
 Death Date:  December 21, 2016
   
 
Sidney D. Drell was professor of theoretical physics (emeritus) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Stanford University, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at the time of his death on December 21, 2016, at the age of 90. He served as SLAC's deputy director until retiring in 1998. A theoretical physicist and arms control specialist, Dr. Drell had also been active as an adviser to the executive and legislative branches of government on national security and defense technical issues. He was a founding member of JASON, a group of academic scientists who consult for the government on issues of national importance, and he acted as a consultant to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a member of the Advisory Committee to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA/DOE) and chaired the Senior Review Board for the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. Dr. Drell was widely recognized for his contributions in the study of theoretical physics, particularly elementary particle processes and quantum theory. His work contributed to the early understanding of meson physics and quantum electrodynamics and then went beyond those areas, ranging from basic studies on quantum chromodynamics on a lattice to such "down the laboratory" problems as the interaction of monopoles with helium. He isolated the processes of secondary particle production from photons from hadron-hadron collisions. Among numerous awards, Dr. Drell received the Heinz award in 2005 for his contributions in public policy, and in 2000 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award, the nation's oldest award in science and technology, for a lifetime of achievement in the field of nuclear energy. He also received the 2012 National Medal of Science. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was coauthor, with J.D. Bjorken, of two books on relativistic quantum mechanics and fields that have been widely translated and used for more than 30 years.
 
31Name:  Dr. Lee A. DuBridge
 Institution:  California Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  1942
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1901
 Death Date:  1/23/94
   
32Name:  Professor Freeman J. Dyson
 Institution:  Institute for Advanced Study
 Year Elected:  1976
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1923
 Death Date:  February 28, 2020
   
 
Freeman J. Dyson was born in 1923 in Crowthorne, England. He received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1945 and came to the United States in 1947 as a Commonwealth Fellow at Cornell University. He settled in the USA permanently in 1951, became a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1953, and retired as Professor Emeritus in 1994. Professor Dyson began his career as a mathematician but then turned to the exciting new developments in physics in the 1940s, particularly the theory of quantized fields. He wrote two papers on the foundations of quantum electrodynamics which have had a lasting influence on many branches of modern physics. He went on to work in condensed-matter physics, statistical mechanics, nuclear engineering, climate studies, astrophysics and biology. Beyond his professional work in physics, Freeman Dyson had a keen awareness of the human side of science and of the human consequences of technology. His books for the general public include "Disturbing the Universe," "Weapons and Hope," "Infinite in All Directions," "Origins of Life," "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet", the essay collection "The Scientist as Rebel", and "Maker of Patterns: An Autobiiography Through Letters" (2018). In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion and in 2012 he was awarded the Henri Poncare Prize. Freeman J. Dyson died February 28, 2020 in Princeton, New Jersey at the age of 96.
 
33Name:  Dr. Leo Esaki
 Institution:  Tsukuba International Congress Center & University of Tsukuba
 Year Elected:  1991
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1925
   
 
Born in Osaka, Japan, physicist Leo Esaki has made many fundamental contributions pertaining to the physics of semiconductor materials. In his early work he demonstrated electron tunnelling in special semiconductor structures, which became known as tunnel or Esaki diodes. This work earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973. In 1960 Dr. Esaki joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and became an IBM Fellow in 1967. More recently he helped establish the field of superlattice physics, creating a new class of artificial materials which display remarkable electronic properties. Known for his technical leadership and accomplishments, Dr. Esaki also possesses a strong interest in the interaction of science with societal issues on an international scale. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Science and the Japan Academy. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1959 and has been awarded the Japanese Government Order of Culture and the American Physical Society's International Prize for New Material, among other honors.
 
34Name:  Dr. William M. Fairbank
 Institution:  Stanford University
 Year Elected:  1978
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1917
 Death Date:  9/30/89
   
35Name:  Dr. Michael E. Fisher
 Institution:  University of Maryland; Cornell University
 Year Elected:  1993
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1931
 Death Date:  November 26, 2021
   
 
Michael E. Fisher has been called the unquestioned father of the modern theory of the behavior of matter at thermodynamic phase transitions and critical points. Beginning with early work on understanding the non-analytic mean description of matter near a critical point (the existence of generalized power-law changes of physical properties in the neighborhood of a critical point), he went on to participate in the great 1965-72 period during which this deep, long-standing problem was effectively solved. Persisting in broadening and deepening the breatkthrough mode in this period, Dr. Fisher's group exploited the renormalization group scheme, which came to penetrate science in fields as far apart as polymers and cosmology. Since 1987 Dr. Fisher has been a professor at the University of Maryland's Institute for Physical Science and Technology. Born in Trinidad in 1931, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, and he has also taught at the Royal Air Force Technical College, King's College, the University of London and, from 1966 to 1987, at Cornell University. Winner of the American Physical Society's Irving Langmuir Prize (1971), the Wolf Prize (1980) and the Boltzmann Medal (1983) among other honors, Dr. Fisher is a fellow of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Indian Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Brasilian Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.
 
36Name:  Dr. Zachary Fisk
 Institution:  University of California, Irvine
 Year Elected:  2010
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1941
   
 
Following an undergraduate physics major at Harvard, I trained with Bernd Matthias at the then new University of California, San Diego, graduating in 1969. After a post doctoral year at Imperial College with Bryan Coles and a year as assistant professor at the University of Chicago, I returned as a research physicist to San Diego and spent the next decade in research on new superconducting and magnetic materials. In 1981, I went to Los Alamos National Laboratory as a staff member with the idea to study the f-electron physics of actinides from a materials driven standpoint. There followed the discovery of so-called heavy Fermion superconductivity in UBe13 and UPt3, the first examples known in this class of superconducting materials after their original discovery of in CeCu2Si2 by Steglich. These materials provided the first convincing evidence of a non-BCS and hence non-trivial superconducting order which has since been found in materials such as the high Tc cuprates. This research on superconductivity at the remarkably fertile boundary with magnetism has been my main research focus and has continued at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee (1994 - 2004) and then at the Universities of California at Davis and now Irvine. A long standing amateur interest has been investigating the Gallina Culture of northern New Mexico. These people occupied hundreds of square miles in canyons and on high mesas along the continental divide in small, often highly defensive, villages over several centuries before vanishing in the late 13th century. My interest has been in trying to understand the physical layout of sites, many of which are well removed from food and water sources.
 
37Name:  Dr. Val L. Fitch
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  1995
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1923
 Death Date:  February 5, 2015
   
 
Val L. Fitch was born the youngest of three children on a cattle ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska, not far from the South Dakota border: a very sparsely populated part of the United States and remote from any center of population. His family later moved to Gordon, Nebraska, a town about 25 miles away, where all of his formal schooling took place. The most significant occurrence in his education, however, came when, as a soldier in the U.S. Army in WWII, he was sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on the Manhattan Project. Under the direction of Ernest Titterton, a member of the British Mission, he was engaged in highly stimulating work while, even as a technician garbed in a military fatigue uniform, he had the opportunity to meet and see at work many of the great figures in physics: Fermi, Bohr, Chadwick, Rabi, Tolman, etc. Dr. Fitch recorded some of the experiences from those days in a chapter in All in Our Time, a book edited by Jane Wilson and published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. All told, he spent three years at Los Alamos and in that period learned well the techniques of experimental physics. He observed that the most accomplished experimentalists were also the ones who knew the most about electronics, so electronic techniques were the first he learned. But mainly he learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job. Robert Bacher, the leader of the physics division in which he worked, offered Dr. Fitch a graduate assistantship at Cornell after the war, but he still had to finish the work for an undergraduate degree, which he did at McGill University. Another opportunity for graduate work soon came from Columbia, and he ended up there working with for his Ph.D. thesis. One day in his office, which he shared at the time with Aage Bohr, Rainwater handed him a preprint of a paper by John Wheeler devoted to µ-mesic atoms. This paper emphasized, in the case of the heavier nuclei, the extreme sensitivity of the Is level to the size of the nucleus. Even though the radiation from these atoms had never been observed, these atomic systems might be a good thesis topic. At this same time a convergence of technical developments took place. The Columbia Nevis cyclotron was just coming into operation. The beams of (pi)-measons from the cyclotron contained an admixture of µ-measons which came from the decay of the (pi)'s and which could be separated by range. Sodium iodide with thallium activation had just been shown by Hofstadter to be an excellent scintillation counter and energy spectrometer for gamma rays. And there were new phototubes just being produced by RCA which were suitable matches to sodium iodide crystals to convert the scintillations to electrical signals. The other essential ingredient to make a gamma-ray spectrometer was a multichannel pulse height analyzer which, utilizing his Los Alamos experience, Dr. Fitch designed and built with the aid of a technician. The net result of all the effort for his thesis was the pioneering work on µ-mesic atoms. It is of interest to note that the group came very close to missing the observation of the gamma-rays completely. Wheeler had calculated the 2p-1s transition energy in Pb, using the then accepted nuclear radius 1.4 A1/3 fermi, to be around 4.5 MeV. Correspondingly, they had set the spectrometer to look in that energy region. After several frustrating days, Rainwater suggested broadening the range and then the peak appeared - not at 4.5 MeV but at 6 MeV! The nucleus was substantially smaller than had been deduced from other effects. Shortly afterwards Hofstadter got the same results from his electron scattering experiments. While the µ-mesic atom measurements give the rms radius of the nucleus with extreme accuracy the electron scattering results have the advantage of yielding many moments to the charge distribution. Now the best information is obtained by combining the results from both µ-mesic atoms and electron scattering. Subsequently, in making precise gamma-ray measurements to obtain a better mass value for the µ-meson, it was found that substantial corrections for the vacuum polarization were required to get agreement with independent mass determinations. While the vacuum polarization is about 2% of the Lamb shift in hydrogen it is the very dominant electrodynamic correction in µ-mesic atoms. Dr. Fitch's interest then shifted to the strange particles and K mesons, but he had learned from his work at Columbia the delights of unexpected results and the challenge they present in understanding nature. Dr. Fitch took a position at Princeton where, most often working with a few graduate students, he spent the next 20 years studying K-mesons. The ultimate in unexpected results was that which was recognized by the Nobel Foundation in 1980, the discovery of CP-violation. At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. Dr. Fitch believed this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always. In 1967 he and Jim Cronin received the Research Corporation award for work on CP violation and in 1976 the John Price Witherill medal of the Franklin Institute. He received the E. O. Lawrence award in 1968. Dr. Fitch was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995. He served as chairman of the Physics Department at Princeton University and was James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics Emeritus at the time of his death February 5, 2015, at age 91.
 
38Name:  Dr. William Alfred Fowler
 Institution:  California Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  1962
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1911
 Death Date:  3/14/95
   
39Name:  Dr. Hans Frauenfelder
 Institution:  University of Illinois & Los Alamos National Laboratory
 Year Elected:  1981
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1922
 Death Date:  July 10, 2022
   
 
Hans Frauenfelder was one of the most important people in realizing biomolecules are dynamic entities and that their motions can be characterized in detail by physical experiments. Frauenfelder made revolutionary contributions in several fields of physics. He started by studying nuclear energy levels, explored the surface effects with radioactivity, discovered perturbed angular correlation, helped elucidate parity violation in the weak interactions, used the Mössbauer effect, and became one of the pioneers of biological physics by creating the field of physics of proteins. In all of these areas, Frauenfelder was able to successfully foster interactions between theory and experiment. Frauenfelder repeatedly crossed disciplinary lines, made significant contributions to biochemistry and biological physics, and demonstrated how developments in one scientific field can transform the development of another. A professor of physics at the University of Illinois for forty years (1952-92), Frauenfelder also served as director of the Center of Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1992 he received the Biological Physics Prize of the American Physical Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Academy Leopoldina, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. He died on July 10, 2022 at the age of 99 in Tusuque, New Mexico.
 
40Name:  Dr. Herbert Friedman
 Institution:  Naval Research Lab
 Year Elected:  1964
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1916
 Death Date:  September 9, 2000
   
Election Year
2021 (2)
2020 (2)
2019 (1)
2018 (1)
2017 (2)
2016 (2)
2015 (2)
2014 (2)
2013 (3)
2012 (1)
2011 (1)
2010 (2)
2009 (1)
2008 (1)
2007 (3)
2006 (2)
2005 (1)
2003 (2)
2002 (2)
2001 (1)
Page: Prev  1 2 3 4 5   ...  Next