SACO, Maine (AP) — A physics professor who earned a Nobel prize for pioneering work that changed the way physicists think about phase transitions has died in Maine at age 77.

Kenneth Wilson was in the physics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for applying his research in quantum physics to phase transitions, the transformation that occurs when a substance goes from, say, liquid to gas. He created a mathematical tool that is still used in physics.