 Other notable Irish physicists include Ernest Walton , winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics . With Sir John Douglas <unk> , he was the first to split the nucleus of the atom by artificial means and made contributions to the development of a new theory of wave equation . William Thomson , or Lord Kelvin , is the person whom the absolute temperature unit , the Kelvin , is named after . Sir Joseph <unk> , a physicist and mathematician , made innovations in the understanding of electricity , dynamics , <unk> and the electron theory of matter . His most influential work was <unk> and <unk> , a book on theoretical physics published in 1900 . 
