Zeeman, then a student at the high school in Zierikzee, made a drawing and description of the phenomenon and submitted it to Nature, where it was published.

After finishing high school in 1883, Zeeman went to Delft for supplementary education in classical languages, then a requirement for admission to University.

After Zeeman passed the qualification exams in 1885, he studied physics at the University of Leiden under Kamerlingh Onnes and Hendrik Lorentz.

[9][10][11][12] In 1896, shortly before moving from Leiden to Amsterdam,[14] he measured the splitting of spectral lines by a strong magnetic field, a discovery now known as the Zeeman effect, for which he won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Lorentz first heard about Zeeman's observations on Saturday 31 October 1896 at the meeting of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, where these results were communicated by Kamerlingh Onnes.

Thanks to Zeeman's work it became clear that the oscillating particles that according to Lorentz were the source of light emission were negatively charged, and were a thousandfold lighter than the hydrogen atom.

Shortly after his discovery, Zeeman was offered a position as lecturer in Amsterdam, where he started to work in the autumn of 1896.

Five years later, in 1908, he succeeded Van der Waals as full professor and Director of the Physics Institute in Amsterdam.

In 1898 Zeeman was elected to membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences[16] in Amsterdam, and he served as its secretary from 1912 to 1920.