JORDAN, PASCUAL

born Oct. 18, 1902, Hannover, Ger. died July 31, 1980, Hannover in full Ernst Pascual Jordan German physicist who in the late 1920s founded (with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg) quantum mechanics and (with Wolfgang Pauli and Eugene Wigner) quantum electrodynamics. He also originated (concurrently with Robert Dicke) a theory of cosmology that proposed to make the universal constants of nature variable and dependent upon the expansion of the universe. Jordan was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rostock (192844), at the University of Berlin (194451), and at the University of Hamburg (after 1951). His works include, with Max Born, Elementare Quantenmechanik (1930; Elementary Quantum Mechanics).