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Mott, Sir Nevill

(Encyclopedia)Mott, Sir Nevill, 1905–96, British physicist. A professor at the Univ. of Bristol (1933–54) and the Univ. of Cambridge (1954–71), Mott won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977 for a lifetime of re...

Bloch, Felix

(Encyclopedia)Bloch, Felix, 1905–83, American physicist, b. Zürich, Switzerland, Ph.D. Univ. of Leipzig, Germany, 1928. He was a professor at Stanford from 1934 until his retirement in 1971. Bloch and Edward Pur...

Brown, Capability

(Encyclopedia)Brown, Capability (Lancelot Brown), 1715–83, English landscape gardener, b. Kirkharle, Northumberland. The leading landscape gardener of his time, he is known for designing gardens that broke with t...

optical activity

(Encyclopedia)optical activity, the ability of asymmetric compounds to rotate the orientation of planar polarized light. Such compounds and their mirror images are know as enantiomers, or optical isomers. Although ...

optics

(Encyclopedia)optics, scientific study of light. Physical optics is concerned with the genesis, nature, and properties of light; physiological optics with the part light plays in vision; and geometrical optics with...

proof, in mathematics

(Encyclopedia)proof, in mathematics, finite sequence of propositions each of which is either an axiom or follows from preceding propositions by one of the rules of logical inference (see symbolic logic). Mathematic...

Changchun

(Encyclopedia)Changchun chängˈcho͝onˈ [key], city, capital of Jilin prov., China, on the railroad between Harbin ...

De Filippo, Eduardo

(Encyclopedia)De Filippo, Eduardo ādwärˈdō dā fēlĭpˈpō [key], 1900–1984, Neapolitan playwright and actor. In his scores of plays he combined pathos and farce. Napoli milionaria (1946) depicts postwar Nap...

eccentric

(Encyclopedia)eccentric, in mechanics, device for changing rotary to back-and-forth motion. A disk is mounted off center on a shaft. One flat, open, circular end of a rod fits around the edge of the disk; the other...
 

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