Ni Wei-tou (; born 1944 in

Zhenhai Zhenhai is a district and former county of the sub-provincial city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province in eastern China. It has a population of 200,000. History The town of Zhenhai grew up at the foot of Zhaobao Hill on a tongue of land at the m ...

Ningbo Ningbo (; Ningbonese: ''gnin² poq⁷'' , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ), formerly romanized as Ningpo, is a major sub-provincial city in northeast Zhejiang province, People's Republic of China. It comprises 6 urban districts, 2 sate ...

Zhejiang Zhejiang ( or , ; , Chinese postal romanization, also romanized as Chekiang) is an East China, eastern, coastal Provinces of China, province of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Hangzhou, and other notable citie ...

) is a Taiwanese

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

, who graduated from the Department of

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; ) is a public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. The university was founded in 1928 during Japanese rule as the seventh of the Imperial Universities. It was named Taihoku Imperial University and served d ...

(NTU), and got his PhD of Physics & Mathematics from

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. After his retirement on 1 October 2000, he is now appointed as a

professor emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

of the Department of Physics of

National Tsing Hua University National Tsing Hua University (NTHU; ) is a public research university in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. National Tsing Hua University was first founded in Beijing. After the Chinese Civil War, the then-president of the university, Mei Yiqi, and othe ...

(NTHU) at

Hsinchu Hsinchu (, Chinese: 新竹, Pinyin: ''Xīnzhú'', Wade–Giles: ''Hsin¹-chu²'') is a city located in northwestern Taiwan. It is the most populous city in Taiwan Province not among the special municipalities, with estimated 450,655 inhabi ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

, since 2006. He is an expert of theoretical and experimental

gravitational physics In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the strong ...

, astrophysics,

cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...

, and

quantum optics Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have ...

etc. He is famous for his alternative theories of gravitation to

general relativity General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...

, such as Ni (1972), Ni (1973), and Lee, Lightman & Ni (1974). He has been devoted to popular science in

Books

* 2017 One Hundred Years of General Relativity: From Genesis and Empirical Foundations to

Gravitational Waves Gravitational waves are waves of the intensity of gravity generated by the accelerated masses of an orbital binary system that propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1 ...

, Cosmology and Quantum Gravity (The 2 Volumes)

References

* * *

External links

Prof. Ni Wei-Tou's intro page at NTHU
(in Chinese) 1944 births Living people National Taiwan University alumni Relativity theorists 20th-century Taiwanese physicists Academic staff of the National Tsing Hua University 21st-century Taiwanese physicists Writers from Ningbo Scientists from Ningbo Taiwanese people from Zhejiang {{Taiwan-scientist-stub