Sir James Hopwood Jeans was a British physicist, astronomer and mathematician who was the first to propose the theory of continuous creation of matter in the universe.

Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he finished second in the university in the Mathematical Tripos of 1898. He taught at Cambridge, but went to Princeton University in 1904 as a professor of applied mathematics. He returned to Cambridge in 1910.

He made important contributions in many areas of physics including quantum theory, the theory of radiation, and stellar evolution. In this last field, his analysis of rotating bodies led him to conclude that Laplace's theory that the solar system formed from a single cloud of gas was incorrect, instead proposing the catastrophic theory, that the material that formed the planets was drawn from the Sun by a near collision with a passing star. This theory is not accepted today.

After his retirement in 1929, he wrote a number of popular science books, including The Stars in Their Courses (1931) The Universe Around Us, Through Space and Time (1934), The New Background of Science (1933), and The Mysterious Universe. Some of his earlier works were The Dynamical Theory of Gases (1904), Theoretical Mechanics (1906) and Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (1908).

He married twice; in 1907 to the American poet Charlotte Mitchell, and in 1935 to the Australian organist and harpsichordist Suzanne Hock.

Quotations

"The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."

"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties" from his book "The Mysterious Universe".