Rayleigh, John William Strutt, Third Baron (1842–1919)
British physicist who was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for his
measurements of the density of the atmosphere
and its component gases, work that led to his isolation of argon
(see also William Ramsay). Rayleigh worked
in many other fields of physics, and is commemorated in the terms Rayleigh
scattering (which describes the way that electromagnetic
radiation is scattered by spherical particles of radius less than 10%
of the wavelength of the radiation –
see scattering, Rayleigh
criterion, and Rayleigh waves (in the study of earthquakes.
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