Jeans, Sir James Hopwood 1877-1946
English physicist, astronomer and writer

Born in Ormskirk, near Southport, he taught at Princeton University and at Cambridge before becoming a research associate at Mt Wilson Observatory in Pasadena. One of his first important results was the development of a formula to describe the distribution of energy of enclosed radiation at long wavelength, now known as the Rayleigh-Jeans law. He also carried out important work on the kinetic theory of gases, giving mathematical proofs of the law of equipartition of energy and James Clerk Maxwell's law of the velocity distribution of the molecules of a gas. He made significant advances in the theory of stellar dynamics by applying mathematics to problems. His wide-ranging research included studies of the formation of binary stars, stellar evolution, the nature of spiral nebulae and the origin of stellar energy, which he believed to be associated with radioactivity. He was renowned as a popularizer of physical and astronomical theories and their philosophical bearings, in works such as The Universe Around Us (1929) and The New Background of Science (1933). He was knighted in 1928.

Bibliography: E A Milne, Sir James Jeans (1952)