Kenneth G. Libbrecht (born June, 1958) [1] is a professor of physics and department chairman at the California Institute of Technology.
Kenneth G. Libbrecht (born June, 1958) [1] is a professor of physics and department chairman at the California Institute of Technology.
Libbrecht received a B.S. in physics at Caltech in 1980. He was originally trained as a solar astronomer, studying under Robert Dicke at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in 1984. [2] However, much of his recent research has focused on the properties of ice crystals, particularly the structure of snowflakes. In addition to his professional papers, he has published several popular books illustrating the variety of snowflake forms:
Libbrecht won the 2004 National Outdoor Book Award (Nature & Environment category) for The Snowflake. [3] Libbrecht was a scientific consultant on snowflakes for the 2013 Film Frozen. [4]
Four of Libbrecht's snowflake pictures were selected by the United States Postal Service as designs for stamps for the 2006 winter holiday season, with a total printing of approximately 3 billion stamps. [5] In 2010, Libbrecht was the recipient of the Lennart Nilsson Award. In conjunction with the award, the Swedish postal service, PostNord, released a series of stamps featuring some of his images of snowflakes. [6]
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States which are strongly devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences. Due to its history of technological innovation, Caltech has been considered to be one of the world's most prestigious universities.
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time. For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.
Ice crystals are solid ice in symmetrical shapes including hexagonal columns, hexagonal plates, and dendritic crystals. Ice crystals are responsible for various atmospheric optic displays and cloud formations.
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism. It was embodied in his fundamental work on the renormalization group.
John Joseph Hopfield is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network.
Wilson Alwyn Bentley, also known as Snowflake Bentley, was an American meteorologist and photographer, who was the first known person to take detailed photographs of snowflakes and record their features. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated, and elaborated the theory that no two snowflakes are alike.
An ice spike is an ice formation, often in the shape of an inverted icicle, that projects upwards from the surface of a body of frozen water. Ice spikes created by natural processes on the surface of small bodies of frozen water have been reported for many decades, although their occurrence is quite rare. A mechanism for their formation, now known as the Bally–Dorsey model, was proposed in the early 20th century but this was not tested in the laboratory for many years. In recent years a number of photographs of natural ice spikes have appeared on the Internet as well as methods of producing them artificially by freezing distilled water in domestic refrigerators or freezers. This has allowed a small number of scientists to test the hypothesis in a laboratory setting and, although the experiments appear to confirm the validity of the Bally–Dorsey model, they have raised further questions about how natural ice spikes form, and more work remains to be done before the phenomenon is fully understood. Natural ice spikes can grow into shapes other than a classic spike shape, and have been variously reported as ice candles, ice towers or ice vases as there is no standard nomenclature for these other forms. One particularly unusual form takes the shape of an inverted pyramid.
Barry Martin Simon is an American mathematical physicist and was the IBM professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 400 publications on mathematics and physics.
Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.
The Einstein Papers Project (EPP) produces the historical edition of the writings and correspondence of Albert Einstein. The EPP collects, transcribes, translates, annotates, and publishes materials from Einstein's literary estate and a multitude of other repositories, which hold Einstein-related historical sources. The staff of the project is an international collaborative group of scholars, editors, researchers, and administrators working on the ongoing authoritative edition, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE).
Snowpack is an accumulation of snow that compresses with time and melts seasonally, often at high elevation or high latitude. Snowpacks are an important water resource that feed streams and rivers as they melt, sometimes leading to flooding. Snowpacks provide water to down-slope communities for drinking and agriculture. High-latitude or high-elevation snowpacks contribute mass to glaciers in their accumulation zones, where annual snow deposition exceeds annual melting.
Ukichiro Nakaya was a Japanese physicist and science essayist known for his work in glaciology and low-temperature sciences. He is credited with making the first artificial snowflakes.
The LeRoy Apker Award is a prize that has been awarded annually by the American Physical Society (APS) since 1978, named after the experimental physicist LeRoy Apker. The recipients are undergraduate students chosen for "outstanding achievements in physics" in order to "provide encouragement to young physicists who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment." The Apker award is the highest honor awarded to undergraduate physicists in the United States. Generally, two prizes are awarded each year: one to a student from a Ph.D. granting institution and one to a student from a non-Ph.D. granting institution. Prior to 1995 the award was granted without institutional distinction, and a single honoree annually was common. The award consists of a $5,000 prize, allowance for traveling to the APS March Meeting to present the work, and a certificate.
A snowflake is a single ice crystal that has achieved a sufficient size, and may have amalgamated with others, which falls through the Earth's atmosphere as snow. Each flake nucleates around a tiny particle in supersaturated air masses by attracting supercooled cloud water droplets, which freeze and accrete in crystal form. Complex shapes emerge as the flake moves through differing temperature and humidity zones in the atmosphere, such that individual snowflakes differ in detail from one another, but may be categorized in eight broad classifications and at least 80 individual variants. The main constituent shapes for ice crystals, from which combinations may occur, are needle, column, plate, and rime. Snow appears white in color despite being made of clear ice. This is due to diffuse reflection of the whole spectrum of light by the small crystal facets of the snowflakes.
Hugh David Politzer is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Thomas Felix Rosenbaum is an American condensed matter physicist, professor of physics, and the current president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Previously, Rosenbaum served as a faculty member and Provost of the University of Chicago. He has also served as the vice president for research at Argonne National Laboratory.
The Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty, launched in 2012, is given annually to rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify the creative use and development of mechanics. The intent of the award is to promote the field of mechanics, especially among young researchers, and commemorate the memory of Professor John Douglas Eshelby. While interdisciplinary work that bridges mechanics with physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines is encouraged, the ideal awardee will demonstrate clear inspiration from mechanics in his or her research. Awardees receive a $1,500 cash prize and a commemorative plaque. The awardees are formally recognized at the annual Applied Mechanics Division banquet at the ASME-IMECE meeting.
