James Dewey Jeans was an English theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, mathematician, and science writer. He was born in Liverpool on 13 January 1877, into a family of Quaker merchants. Jeans' father, Thomas Jeans, was a successful businessman who founded the family's textile business in Liverpool in 1868. He had three sons: William who became a notable mathematician, James Dewey who became an astrophysicist and Thomas Jeans who became a noted philanthropist. After attending Quaker schools in Liverpool and Dundee, the family moved to the United States when James was eleven years old. His father's business interests led to them initially living in New York City before settling in Philadelphia in 1884; he attended the Curtis Institute of Music during the academic year 1884-1885 where he studied violin with Aaron Rosand. He graduated with honors in physics from Swarthmore College (1898) and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University (1903). While at Hopkins he started his long association with the "University Physics Seminars" series for undergraduate students; it continues today as the "University Physics Lectures". He was also interested in writing fiction, although he never published any
He married Anne Elizabeth Peto (1873-1941) on 1 October 1901, and had two daughters: Joan Jeans (1902-1995) and Virginia Jeans (1908-2005). In 1904 he accepted a position at Harvard University as an assistant professor of physics, but soon left to pursue research on variable stars over the next few years. In 1906 he published a paper that coined the term "nuclear atom" for then unknown subatomic particles that would later become known as protons and neutrons. This discovery ultimately led to quantum theory.
In 1907 he took a position as professor of physics at Bryn Mawr College, where he remained until 1913 when he returned to Harvard as chairman of the department of astronomy for two years until 1916. In 1919 he accepted his last academic appointment as professor of astronomy at Rice Institute until 1922. In 1927 Jeans retired from teaching altogether to devote himself entirely to writing novels under his own name and those of several close associates including Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H.
G. Wells. He died on 29 December 1936 by which time he had completed some seventy books and thousands of articles covering a range of subject matter not just astronomy but history painting,
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.James Jeans
Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.James Jeans
