James H. Jeans Biography

Sir James Hopwood Jeans, born on September 11th 1877 and died on September 16th 1946, was an English physicist and mathematician who was the first person to propose that matter is continually formulated throughout the universe. He studied at many grammar schools throughout his childhood and Trinity College in Cambridge. He was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College in 1901 and taught at Cambridge. He moved on to teach at Princeton University in 1904 as a professor of applied mathematics but returned to Cambridge in 1910. He provided many positive contributions to physics and astronomy such as quantum theory, stellar evolution, and the theory of radiation. Sir Jeans proposed the idea that the planets condensed from material drawn out of the Sun by a hypothetical near-collision with a passing star; this idea is not accepted in the modern world. Jeans is one of the founders of cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe. Much of his work included investigations of star systems, dwarf stars, sources of stellar energy and the deconstruction of rapidly spinning bodies. He published many scientific works that launched his scientific reputation such as The Dynamical Theory of Gases (1904), Theoretical Mechanics (1906), and Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (1908). One of his major discoveries is the Jeans length, which is a critical radius of an interstellar cloud in space. He created an alternate to the equation called the Jeans instability which solves for the critical mass a cloud must attain before collapsing. Another law that he helped in creating is the Rayleigh--Jeans Law, which relates the energy density of blackbody radiation the an emission source's temperature. Jeans garnered multiple awards for his scientific achievements such as the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1919 and being a Member of the Order of Merit in 1939. Sir James Hopwood Jeans has had a lasting impact on the scientific realm with his publications in physics, astronomy, and applied mathematics.