Background

On September 11, 1877, James Jeans was born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, the son of a parliamentary journalist. He was brought up in a strict, very religious Victorian home atmosphere.

Education

A precocious child, he was reading by age 4 and had a remarkable ability to memorize numbers. At an early age he also became interested in physics, as well as in mechanical devices, especially clocks—the subject of a short book he wrote at age 9.

In 1897 Jeans entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1903 received his master's degree.

Jeans was awarded numerous honorary degrees and professional offices.

Career

In 1904 he was appointed university lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge; and in 1906, at the very early age of 28, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society—all this in spite of the fact that during 1902-1903 tuberculosis of the joints forced him to go to several sanatoriums. During his illness, from which he completely recovered, he wrote his first book, The Dynamical Theory of Gases.

Jeans taught applied mathematics at Princeton University, N. J. , from 1905 to 1909. He returned to Cambridge as Stokes lecturer in 1910 but 2 years later relinquished the position and thereafter devoted full time to research and writing.

In the first period of his scientific life (1901-1914), Jeans's interests were centered mainly on the kinetic theory of gases and the theory of radiation, especially applied to the new quantum theory of Max Planck and others. Through a vigorous interchange of ideas, Lord Rayleigh and Jeans, in 1905, separately derived what later came to be called the Rayleigh-Jeans law. Despite the fact that this law implied a failure of classical theory when applied to blackbody radiation, Jeans, during the ensuing years, repeatedly attempted to sustain classical theory instead of accepting quantum theory. Only after Henri Poincaré's 1912 paper on the quantum theory did Jeans become convinced. Two years later Jeans wrote a brief but comprehensive Report on Radiation and the Quantum Theory, which, after World War I, was extremely influential in convincing physicists of the importance of the new quantum ideas.

During the war years Jeans experienced his finest hour as a scientist—now a theoretical astrophysicist. His researches on stellar structure were most significant, especially his proof that a rotating incompressible mass will, with increasing rotational velocity, first become pearshaped and then cataclysmically fission into two parts (one model for a single star evolving into a double-star system). This and other important results, including a tidal encounter nebular hypothesis that replaced the classical Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis, were published in his 1919 Adams Prize essay, Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics.

The next decade of Jeans's life (1918-1928) was marked by a rather sharp decrease in his reputation as a theoretical astrophysicist. Already, in 1917, he had a famous debate with Arthur S. Eddington on stellar structure and, though not really apparent at the time, Jeans by and large emerged the loser. In 1929 Jeans turned to popular science writing, especially in astronomy, and soon became very successful. His Universe around Us ushered in a series of eight books between 1929 and 1942. All are stimulating expositions, though they suffer in one degree or another from presenting the results of scientific research a bit too dogmatically, thereby giving a distorted picture of such research in progress.

Jeans died on September 16, 1946, at his home in Dorking, Surrey.

Achievements

• Sir James Hopwood Jeans made important contributions to the development of quantum theory and to theoretical astrophysics, especially to the theory of stellar structure.
  
  He was knighted in 1928 and won the coveted Order of Merit in 1939.
  
  In 1933 Hopwood-Jeans was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Through Space and Time.
  
  The crater Jeans on the Moon is named after him, as is the crater Jeans on Mars.
  
  At Merchant Taylors' School there is a James Jeans Academic Scholarship for the candidate in the entrance exams who displays outstanding results across the spectrum of subjects, notably in mathematics and the sciences.

Works

Works Gallery

• book

  • The New Background of Science

    (Published in 1934 as a second edition to James Jeans' pop...)

  • Astronomy and cosmogony

    (This second edition, originally published in 1929, is an ...)

  • Atomicity and Quanta (Cambridge Library Collection - Physical Sciences)

    (This is the full text of James Jeans's Rouse Ball Lecture...)

  • Physics and philosophy

    (Originally published in 1942, this book discusses an emer...)

  • Problems of Cosmology and Stellar Dynamics (Cambridge Library Collection - Mathematics)

    (Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics is a theoretic...)

  • Science and Music

    (Sir James Jeans has used his remarkable gifts of expositi...)

  • Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (Cambridge Library Collection - Physical Sciences)

    (Sir James Jeans' well-known treatise covers the topics in...)

  • The growth of physical science

    (The growth of physical science Jan 01, 1967 Jeans, Sir Ja...)

  • The Mysterious Universe

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Through Space and Time
  • The Stars in their Courses

Views

Quotations: "The essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures. "

"The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. .. we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. "

"We have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. "

"The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker. "

"Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself. "

"In this model, the sun is a very tiny speck of dust indeed-a speck less than a three-thousandth of an inch in diameter . .. Think of the sun as something less than a speck of dust in a vast city, of the earth as less than a millionth part of such a speck of dust, and we have perhaps as vivid a picture as the mind can really grasp of the relation of our home in space to the rest of the universe. "

"The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot. "

"The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means. "

"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties. "

"We may as well cut out group theory. That is a subject that will never be of any use in physics. "

"Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars. "

Membership

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in May, 1906.

Personality

He was a modest and unassuming man and a devoted father.

Connections

In 1907 Jeans married Charlotte Tiffany Mitchell; she died in 1934, leaving one daughter. The following year he married Suzanne Hock, a concert organist, with whom Jeans wrote his very popular and informative book Science and Music (1938). They had two sons and a daughter.

father:

William Tulloch Jeans

(1848–1907)

mother:

Martha Ann Jeans

daughter:

Katharine Jeans

daughter:

Olivia Jeans

spouse (2):

Susi Jeans

(1911–1993)

spouse (1):

Charlotte Tiffany Mitchell

References

• A Short History of Wilson's School
• Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell (Oct 15 1986)