Jeans, Sir James

Jeans, Sir James. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1930 E. P. Dutton Company, Inc., New York, 1958 (paperback edition). 

In 1928, the English scientist and idealist Sir James Jean revived the old heat death argument, augmented with elements from Einstein s relativity theory since matter and energy are equivalents, he claimed, the universe must finally end up in the complete conversion of matter into energy ... 

The Dynamical Theory of Gases, Sir James Jeans. 2.75 Electron and Ion Emission from Solids, R. O. Jenkins and W. C. Trodden. 1.35... 

Jeans instability Instability in a cloud of gas in space due to fluctuations in the density of the gas, causing the matter in the cloud to clump together and lead to gravitational collapse. The conditions under which this occurs were worked out by Sir James Hopwood Jeans (1877-1946) in terms of Newtonian gravity. The analogous analysis of this problem using general relativity theory is the basis of the theory of structure formation. 

I remember his lectures in Oxford in early 1948. The lecture hall was too small to hold all who wished to attend there was standing room only. He told those of us who had never studied electrostatics to go home and read Sir James Jeans s book on that subject before coming to his lectures on chemical bonding. I had never studied electrostatics but I stayed, spellbound. I had never heard anyone quite like him, with his jokes, his relaxed manner, his seraphic smile, his slide-rule calculations and his spontaneous flow of ideas. (Only much later did I realize that much of that apparent spontaneity was carefully studied.) He had great histrionic skills. 

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, 1842-1919, was the 1904 Nobel Prize winner in physics, and Sir James Jeans, 1877-1946, was a British astronomer and physicist. 

Fig. 25. - Approximate sketch of the growth of thermodynamic conception with the portraits of some famous pioneers, left column from above Joseph Black (1728-1799), Sadi Nicholas Carnot (1796-1832), Rudolf Jutius Clausius (1822-1888), Josiah Wiiland Gibbs (1839-1903), Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906), right Kelvin, Baron of Larges, Lord Williams Thompson (1824-1907), Jean Baptiste Fourier (1768-1830), James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879), Max Carl Planck (1858-1947), Lars Onsager (1903-1976), middle Sir Issak Newton (1642-1726), Clifford Ambrose Truesdell (1921 -) and Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003).

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