Lord Rayleigh: John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh

摘要

John William Strutt, first son of the second BaronRayleigh, was born on 12 November 1842. He was a sickly boy, so his schooling was sporadic. Nevertheless, he was first in his year at Cambridge and was a Fellow of Trinity College until his marriage in 1871. His father died in 1873 and he succeeded to the title third Baron Rayleigh. He converted the stable block of his country house, Terling Place, into a laboratory. In 1879, he moved back to Cambridge as Professor of Experimental Physics but returned to Terling in 1884. He published "The Theory of Sound" in 1877/78 and 466 other scientific articles. He received the 1904 Noble Prize in Physics for the discovery of argon and made numerous seminal contributions to scientific progress. In the field of acoustics, he studied scattering, the diffraction limit, surface waves, resonance phenomena, reciprocity, streaming, radiation force, cavitation, relaxation and binaural perception. He received many honors, was President of the Royal Society, one of the founding Members of the Order of Merit and Chancellor of Cambridge University. He was also interested in psychical research. Lord Rayleigh died on 30 June 1919.