Jeans, Sir James

Jeans, Sir James (Hopwood)

(born Sept. 11, 1877, London, Eng.—died Sept. 16, 1946, Dorking, Surrey) British physicist and mathematician. After teaching at Cambridge and Princeton, he worked as a research associate at the Mount Wilson Observatory (1923–44). He proposed that matter was continuously created throughout the universe (see steady-state theory). He wrote on a wide variety of phenomena but is perhaps best known as a writer of popular books about astronomy.