National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist who first observed the phenomenon of superconductivity while carrying out pioneering work in the field of cryogenics. An important step on the way to this discovery was his success in...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Georg Ohm
Georg Simon Ohm had humble roots and struggled financially throughout most of his life, but the German physicist is well known today for his formulation of a law, termed Ohm's law, describing the mathematical relationship between...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Hans Christian Orsted
A discovery by Hans Christian Orsted forever changed the way scientists think about electricity and magnetism. While preparing to perform an experiment during a lecture at the University of Copenhagen, he found that the magnetized needle...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Karl Alexander Muller
In their search for new superconductors, Swiss theoretical physicist Karl Alexander Muller and his young colleague, J. Georg Bednorz, abandoned the metal alloys typically used in superconductivity research in favor of a class of oxides...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Walther Meissner
Walther Meissner discovered while working with Robert Ochsenfeld that superconductors expel relatively weak magnetic fields from their interior and are strongly diamagnetic. This phenomenon, commonly known as the Meissner effect or the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. His theoretical work on electromagnetism and light largely determined the direction that physics would take in the early twentieth century. Indeed,...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Theodore Maiman
Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser. Ironically, Maiman's first paper announcing this momentous achievement, which many other scientists had been racing to complete themselves, was rejected. Since then, however, lasers...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Max Planck
In a career that lasted seven decades, Max Planck achieved an enduring legacy with groundbreaking discoveries involving the relationship between heat and energy, but he is most remembered as the founder of the "quantum theory."
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Nikola Tesla
Awarded more than 100 patents over the course of his lifetime, Nikola Tesla was a man of considerable genius and vision. He was reportedly born at exactly midnight during an electrical storm, an intriguing beginning for a man who would...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Werner Von Siemens
In 1866, the research of Werner von Siemens would lead to his discovery of the dynamo electric principle that paved the way for the large-scale generation of electricity through mechanical means.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: William Shockley
Find out about William Bradford Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the first point-contact transistor and the invention of the more advanced junction transistor. His later research focused on developing...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Claude Shannon
Claude Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer whose work underlies modern information theory and helped instigate the digital revolution. He was the first person to recognize how Boolean algebra could be used to great...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Julian Schwinger
Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger used the mathematical process of renormalization to rid the quantum field theory developed by Paul Dirac of serious incongruities with experimental observations that had nearly prompted the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: John Robert Schrieffer
While still in graduate school, John Robert Schrieffer developed with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper a theoretical explanation of superconductivity that garnered the trio the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. The BCS theory (the acronym...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Heinrich Rohrer
Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer co-invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a non-optical instrument that allows the observation of individual atoms in three dimensions, with Gerd Binnig. The achievement garnered the pair half...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Isidor Isaac Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his development of a technique for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atomic nuclei. Rabi's technique was based on the resonance principle first described by Irish...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Edward Purcell
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who received half of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of a new method of ascertaining the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Known as nuclear magnetic resonance...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Joseph John Thomson
Joseph John Thomson, better known as J. J. Thomson, was a British physicist who first theorized and offered experimental evidence that the atom was a divisible entity rather than the basic unit of matter, as was widely believed at the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Make a Compass
Learn how to make a simple compass right at home. [1 min, 21 secs]
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: How Atmospheric Pressure Affects Objects
A bell jar, Peeps and balloons demonstrate how changing the atmospheric pressure around objects can change their size. [3:18]
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Carl Edwin Wieman
Carl Edwin Wieman is one of three physicists credited with the discovery of a fifth phase of matter, for which he was awarded a share of the prestigious Nobel Prize in 2001. The recognition capped a distinguished career that began deep...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Wilhelm Weber
Find out more about German physicist Wilhelm Weber, who developed and enhanced a variety of devices for sensitively detecting and measuring magnetic fields and electrical currents.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: James Watt
The Scottish instrument maker and inventor James Watt had a tremendous impact on the shape of modern society. His improvements to the steam engine were a significant factor in the Industrial Revolution, and when the Watt engine was...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Sin Itiro Tomonaga
Japanese theoretical physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga resolved key problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) developed by Paul Dirac in the late 1920s through the use of a mathematical technique he referred to as...