Henry Cavendish prefiguring thermodynamics. Theoretical physicist Dietrich Belitz concluded that in this work Cavendish "got the nature of heat essentially right." As Cavendish performed his famous density of the Earth experiment in an outbuilding in the garden of his Clapham Common estate, his neighbours would point out the building and tell their children that it was where the world was weighed. In honour of Henry Cavendish's achievements and due to an endowment granted by Henry's relative William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, the University of Cambridge's physics laboratory was named the Cavendish Laboratory by James Clerk Maxwell, the first Cavendish Professor of
Columbia University Physics Department x-ray transitions in muonic atoms. Richard Garwin and Leon Lederman observed parity nonconservation in pion and muon decay. Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger proved that the muon neutrino was distinct from the electron neutrino. Today, Columbia experimenters conduct work at labs across the world. These include CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois. Pupin Labs also houses a 400-Gigaflops dedicated supercomputer built by Norman Christ, which is used for calculations in lattice quantum chromodynamics. Scientists who have received the Nobel Prize for work done while on faculty at Columbia