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low-temperature physics

(Encyclopedia)low-temperature physics, science concerned with the production and maintenance of temperatures much below normal, down to almost absolute zero, and with various phenomena that occur only at such tempe...

solid-state physics

(Encyclopedia)solid-state physics, study of the properties of bulk matter rather than those of the individual particles that compose it. Solid-state physics is concerned with the properties exhibited by atoms and m...

McDonald, Arthur Bruce

(Encyclopedia)McDonald, Arthur Bruce, 1943–, Canadian astrophysicist, Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1969. McDonald was a researcher at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ottawa, Canada, from 1970...

Bridgman, Percy Williams

(Encyclopedia)Bridgman, Percy Williams, 1882–1961, American physicist, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1904; Ph.D., 1908). From 1910 he taught at Harvard, as professor from 1919. He won the 1946 Nobel P...

Kajita, Takaaki

(Encyclopedia)Kajita, Takaaki 1959–, Japanese physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Tokyo, 1986. In 1988 he joined the faculty at the Univ. of Tokyo, where he is now professor and director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Res...

Thomson, Sir Joseph John

(Encyclopedia)Thomson, Sir Joseph John, 1856–1940, English physicist. From 1884 to 1919 he was Cavendish professor of experimental physics at Cambridge. J. J. Thomson was one of the founders of modern physics. Wi...

Lemonnier, Pierre Charles

(Encyclopedia)Lemonnier, Pierre Charles pyĕr shärl ləmônyāˈ [key], 1715–99, French astronomer. For many years he was professor of physics at the Collège de France. He studied the moon and the influence of ...

Hulse, Russell Alan

(Encyclopedia)Hulse, Russell Alan, 1950–, American astrophysicist, b., New York City, Ph.D. Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975. Hulse was a researcher at the Princeton's plasma physics laboratory from 1977 unt...

chinook, warm, dry air mass

(Encyclopedia)chinook, warm, dry air mass that descends the eastern slopes of the U.S. and Canadian Rocky Mts. after having lost moisture by condensation over the western slopes. Chinooks occur mainly in winter. Th...

conservation laws

(Encyclopedia)conservation laws, in physics, basic laws that together determine which processes can or cannot occur in nature; each law maintains that the total value of the quantity governed by that law, e.g., mas...