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Land's End

(Encyclopedia)Land's End, promontory, Cornwall, SW England, forming the westernmost extremity of the English mainland. Of wave-carved granite, it has cliffs c.60 ft (20 m) high. Offshore are reefs and rocky islets,...

Lockyer, Sir Joseph Norman

(Encyclopedia)Lockyer, Sir Joseph Norman lŏkˈyər [key], 1836–1920, English astronomer, educated on the Continent. One of the first to make a spectroscopic examination of the sun and stars, he devised (1868), i...

Arago, Dominique François

(Encyclopedia)Arago, Dominique François dômēnēkˈ fräNswäˈ ärägōˈ [key], 1786–1853, French physicist and astronomer. He is noted for his discoveries in magnetism and optics as well as for his astronomi...

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...

Powell, Cecil Frank

(Encyclopedia)Powell, Cecil Frank, 1903–69, British nuclear physicist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1927. Powell joined the faculty at the Univ. of Bristol in 1927, was named Melville Wills Professor of Physics in 1948, and ...

Chu, Steven

(Encyclopedia)Chu, Steven, 1948–, U.S. physicist and government official, b. St. Louis, Mo., grad. Univ. of Rochester (B.S., A.B. 1970), Univ. of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1976). He worked from 1978 at Bell Lab...

Nambu, Yoichiro

(Encyclopedia)Nambu, Yoichiro yoiˈchērō nämˈbo͞o [key], 1921–2015, Japanese-American physicist, b. Tokyo, D.Sc. Univ. of Tokyo, 1952. He studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, with Albert E...

Wheeler, John Archibald

(Encyclopedia)Wheeler, John Archibald, 1911–2008, American physicist and educator, b. Jacksonville, Fla. Educated at Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1933), he joined the faculty at Princeton in 1938, and after 1976 was dir...

Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike

(Encyclopedia)Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike hīˈkə käˈmərlĭng ônˈəs [key], 1853–1926, Dutch physicist. He was, from 1882, professor of physics at the Univ. of Leiden. He made important studies of the propertie...

L'Huillier, Anne

(Encyclopedia)Anne L'Huillier, 1958–, b. Paris, France, French-Swedish physicist, studied at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, and Commissariat à l’Energ...