John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh summary

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John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, (born Nov. 12, 1842, Langford Grove, Essex, Eng.—died June 30, 1919, Terling Place, Witham, Essex), English physicist. In 1873 he succeeded to his father’s title and built a research laboratory on his estate. He taught physics at Cambridge University (1879–84) and was secretary of the Royal Society (1884–95). His research included work on electromagnetism, colour, acoustics, and diffraction gratings, and his theory explaining the blue colour of the sky evolved into the Rayleigh scattering law. In 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his isolation of argon. In 1908 he became chancellor of Cambridge University. His influential Theory of Sound (1877, 1878) examines questions of vibrations and resonance of media.

Nobel Prize Summary

Nobel Prize, any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed for that purpose by the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual

argon Summary

Argon (Ar), chemical element, inert gas of Group 18 (noble gases) of the periodic table, terrestrially the most abundant and industrially the most frequently used of the noble gases. Colourless, odourless, and tasteless, argon gas was isolated (1894) from air by the British scientists Lord Rayleigh

wave Summary

Wave, propagation of disturbances from place to place in a regular and organized way. Most familiar are surface waves that travel on water, but sound, light, and the motion of subatomic particles all exhibit wavelike properties. In the simplest waves, the disturbance oscillates periodically (see

acoustics Summary

Acoustics, the science concerned with the production, control, transmission, reception, and effects of sound. The term is derived from the Greek akoustos, meaning “heard.” Beginning with its origins in the study of mechanical vibrations and the radiation of these vibrations through mechanical