John G. King (physicist)

John Gordon King (1925–2014 ) was an English-born American physicist who was the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the former director of MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory, and the former associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Best known for his work on null experiments, King was also involved in the Physical Sciences Study Committee (PSSC) with his doctoral advisor Jerrold Zacharias.

Additionally, he is the inventor of the molecular microscope.

King obtained undergraduate (1950) and graduate degrees (1953) in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and soon after he was appointed to the faculty there.

As a young professor, he helped produce and acted in several PSSC educational movies, including Time and Clocks, Interference of Photons, Size of Atoms from an Atomic Beam Experiment, and Velocity of Atoms.

King also developed innovative courses such as Concentrated Study, Project Lab, and Corridor Lab, which emphasized hands-on learning, independence of thought, and the scientific method.

King’s null experiments included searching for charge equality between the proton and electron, quarks, magnetic monopoles, and a variant of the continuous creation theory of matter proposed by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, and Hermann Bondi.

He has received the Alfred P. Sloan Award (1956), the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) Apparatus Competition prize (1961), the AAPT Robert Millikan Medal (1965), the Danforth Foundation's E. Harris Harbison Award for Gifted Teaching (1971), and most recently the Oersted Medal from the AAPT in 2000.