• Physicist Pascual Jordan, 1902
• Physicist Carl Henry Brans, 1935

Jordan joined the Nazi party (like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark), which isolated them within the physics community.

An ancestor of Pascual Jordan named Pascual Jorda was a Spanish nobleman and cavalry officer who served with the British during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Jorda eventually settled in Hanover, which in those days was a possession of the British royal family. The family name was eventually changed to Jordan (pronounced in the German manner, "YOUR-dunn"). A family tradition dictated that the first born son in each generation be named Pascual.

Jordan enrolled in the Hanover Technical University in 1921 where he studied an eclectic mix of zoology, mathematics and physics. As was typical for a German university student of the time, he shifted his studies to another university before obtaining a degree. Göttingen University, his destination in 1923, was then at the very zenith of its prowess and fame in mathematics and the physical sciences. At Göttingen Jordan became an assistant first to mathematician Richard Courant and then to physicist Max Born.

Together with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg Jordan was co-author of an important series of papers on quantum mechanics. He went on to pioneer early quantum field theory before largely switching his focus to cosmology before World War II.

Jordan devised a type of non - associative algebras, now named Jordan algebras in his honor, in an attempt to create an algebra of observables for quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Today, von Neumann algebras are employed for this purpose. Jordan algebras have since been applied in projective geometry and number theory.

In 1966, Jordan published the 182 page work Die Expansion der Erde. Folgerungen aus der Diracschen Gravitationshypothese (The expansion of the Earth. Conclusions from the Dirac gravitation hypothesis) in which he developed his theory that, according to Paul Dirac's hypothesis of a steady weakening of gravitation throughout the history of the universe, the Earth may have swollen to its current size, from an initial ball of a diameter of only about 7,000 kilometers (4,300 mi). This theory could explain why the ductile lower sima layer of the Earth's crust is of a comparatively uniform thickness, while the brittle upper sial layer of the Earth's crust had broken apart into the main continental plates. The continents having to adapt to the ever flatter surface of the growing ball, the mountain ranges on the Earth's surface would, in the course of that, have come into being as constricted folds.

Jordan enlisted in the Luftwaffe in 1939 and worked as a weather analyst at the Peenemünde rocket center, for a while. During the war he attempted to interest the Nazi party in various schemes for advanced weapons. His suggestions were ignored because he was considered "politically unreliable," probably because of his past associations with Jews (in particular: Courant, Born, and Wolfgang Pauli) and "Jewish Physics".

Had Jordan not joined the Nazi party, it is conceivable that he could have shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Born and Walther Bothe.

Wolfgang Pauli declared Jordan "rehabilitated" to the authorities some time after the war, allowing him to regain academic employment after a two year period and then recover his full status as a tenured professor in 1953. Jordan went against Pauli's advice, and reentered politics after the period of denazification came to an end under the pressures of the Cold War. He secured election to the Bundestag standing with the conservative Christian Democratic Union. In 1957 Jordan supported the arming of the Bundeswehr with tactical nuclear weapons by the Adenauer government, while the Göttinger 18 (which included Born and Heisenberg) issued the Göttinger Manifest in protest. This and other issues were to further strain his relationships with his former friends and colleagues.

A Texan, born in Dallas, Carl Brans spent his academic career in neighboring Louisiana, graduating in 1957 from Loyola University New Orleans. Having obtained his Ph.D from New Jersey's Princeton University in 1961, he returned to Loyola in 1960 and, in 1970, was appointed professor of physics. Since then he has held visiting professorships at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Koeln, Germany.

Brans is well known among those engaged in the study of gravity and is noted for his development, with Robert H. Dicke of the Brans - Dicke theory of gravitation in which the gravitational constant varies with time, a leading competitor of Einstein's theory of general relativity. The work of Brans and Dicke actually was closely related to earlier work of Pascal Jordan, but was developed independently. Properly this should then be called the "Jordan - Brans - Dicke," JBD, scalar - tensor theory of gravity. In this theory, based on speculations of Dirac and others, a universally coupled scalar field, in addition to the metric, is introduced which ultimately results in a theory in which the gravitational constant depends on the distribution of matter in the universe. A number of very accurate measurements made in the late 1970s has failed to detect this and some of the other predictions made by the Brans - Dicke theory. However, recent developments in string theory and cosmology as renewed interest in scalar field modifications of standard general relativity.

Brans also began study of developments in differential topology concerning the existence of exotic (non-standard) global differential structures and their possible applications to physics. This work includes looking at the exotic 7-sphere of Milnor as an exotic Yang - Mills bundle, and most especially the infinity of exotic differential structures on Euclidean four space as alternative models for space - time in general relativity. Much of this work has been done in collaboration with Torsten Asselmeyer - Maluga of Berlin. Together they published a book, Exotic Smoothness and Physics World Scientific Press, 2007.