Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann (16 August 1845 – 12 July 1921) was a French physicist and inventor who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 "for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference".

His father, Isaïe, a French Jew born in Ennery near Metz, managed the family glove-making business at the former convent in Bonnevoie.

In 1868, he was admitted to the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he failed the agrégation examination which would have enabled him to enter the teaching profession, preferring instead to study physics.

In 1872, the French government sent him on a mission to Heidelberg University, where he was able to specialize in electricity with the encouragement of Gustav Kirchhoff, receiving a doctorate with "summa cum laude" distinction in 1874.

In a paper delivered to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 17 January 1883, John G. M'Kendrick described the apparatus as follows: Lippmann's PhD thesis, presented to the Sorbonne on 24 July 1875, was on electrocapillarity.

[13] Above all, Lippmann is remembered as the inventor of a method for reproducing colours by photography, based on the interference phenomenon, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1908.

"[3] By April 1892, he was able to report that he had succeeded in producing colour images of a stained glass window, a group of flags, a bowl of oranges topped by a red poppy and a multicoloured parrot.

Lippmann made use of this phenomenon by projecting an image onto a special photographic plate capable of recording detail smaller than the wavelengths of visible light.

The light passes through the supporting glass sheet into a very thin and nearly transparent photographic emulsion containing sub microscopically small silver halide grains.

After development, the result is a structure of lamellae, a very fine fringe pattern in distinct parallel layers composed of submicroscopic metallic silver grains, which is a permanent record of the standing waves.

[9] The finished plate is illuminated from the front at a nearly perpendicular angle, using daylight or another source of white light containing the full range of wavelengths in the visible spectrum.

[17] This principle of using numerous lenses or imaging apertures to record what was later termed a light field underlies the evolving technology of light-field cameras and microscopes.

[4] Lippmann also invented the coelostat, an astronomical tool that compensated for the Earth's rotation and allowed a region of the sky to be photographed without apparent movement.

[4] In 1900, he proposed what is later called the Brownian ratchet, as a purely mechanical version of Maxwell's demon, purportedly showing that the kinetic theory of gas is incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics.