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
UH Physics Department 2000. His PhD thesis (1985-1990) was on statistical mechanics of commensurate-incommensurate phase transitions under the supervision of Robert Griffiths. Prof. Simon Charles Moss joined the physics department in 1972 performin research on the full gamut of materials from hetero- structures and multilayers to quasi-crystals and decagonal crystals using x-ray and neutron scattering as probes of order in matter. He died of a heart attack on 14 March 2011. UH Physics Department The Department of Physics at the is a department of the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics performing research traditional fields such as High Energy Physics