Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Bragg, Sir William Lawrence

(Encyclopedia)Bragg, Sir William Lawrence, 1890–1971, English physicist, b. Adelaide, Australia, educated in Australia and at Trinity College, Cambridge; son of W. H. Bragg. He was professor of physics at Victori...

electron

(Encyclopedia)electron, elementary particle carrying a unit charge of negative electricity. Ordinary electric current is the flow of electrons through a wire conductor (see electricity). The electron is one of the ...

energy

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Relations between potential energy (PE) and kinetic energy (KE) for a swinging pendulum energy, in physics, the ability or capacity to do work or to produce change. Forms of energy include hea...

Alvarez, Luis Walter

(Encyclopedia)Alvarez, Luis Walter, 1911–88, American physicist, b. San Francisco, grad. Univ. of Chicago, 1932, Ph.D. 1936. He was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of a large number of r...

correspondence principle

(Encyclopedia)correspondence principle, physical principle, enunciated by Niels Bohr in 1923, according to which the predictions of the quantum theory must correspond to the predictions of the classical theories of...

Rainwater, James

(Encyclopedia)Rainwater, James, 1917–86, American physicist, Ph.D. Columbia, 1946. After working on the Manhattan Project as a student during World War II, he became a professor of physics at Columbia in 1952. Hi...

Hansen, William Webster

(Encyclopedia)Hansen, William Webster, 1909–49, U.S. physicist, b. Fresno, Calif. Hansen received his doctorate in physics from Stanford in 1933 and joined the faculty there in 1934. He invented the high-quality ...

stellar structure

(Encyclopedia)stellar structure, physical properties of a star and the processes taking place within it. Except for that of the sun, astronomers must draw their conclusions regarding stellar structure on the basis ...

nobelium

(Encyclopedia)nobelium nōbēˈlēəm [key], artificially produced radioactive chemical element; symbol No; at. no. 102; mass no. of most stable isotope 259; m.p. 827℃; b.p. and density unknown; valence +2, +3. I...

relativity

(Encyclopedia)relativity, physical theory, introduced by Albert Einstein, that discards the concept of absolute motion and instead treats only relative motion between two systems or frames of reference. One consequ...