Theodor Kaluza (physicist)

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Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza (born November 9, 1885 in Wilhelmsthal (incorporated into Opole in 1899 ), Upper Silesia , † January 19, 1954 in Göttingen ) was a German physicist and mathematician. Together with Oskar Klein , he developed the Kaluza-Klein theory .

Life

Kaluza came from a German Catholic family from Ratibor in Upper Silesia (now Racibórz in Poland). He himself was born in Wilhelmsthal, a village that was incorporated into the city of Opole (now Opole) in 1899 . He spent his youth in Königsberg (Prussia) , where his father Max Kaluza was a professor of English.

Scientific career

He studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the Albertina and received his doctorate there on August 17, 1907 under the guidance of Meyer on the subject of the Tschirnhaus transformation of algebraic equations with an unknown. In 1909 the habilitation followed and he was appointed private lecturer . He spent an unusually long time in this position, namely 20 years, before he was appointed to a chair at Kiel University in 1929 . In 1935 he accepted a call to Göttingen , where he taught and researched until his retirement . In 1938 he was elected a full member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Kaluza is mainly due to its original approach for a unified field theory known that the gravitational and Maxwell's electrodynamics should unite. To this end, he introduced a fifth dimension to the four-dimensional spacetime of the relativity theory, which enabled the integration of Maxwell's equations . When Einstein found out about the theory, he was very impressed and wrote to Kaluza:

"I have great respect for the beauty and boldness of your thought."

With Einstein's support, the work was published in 1921 in the work session reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . However, the great success of the developing quantum mechanics let this work gradually fade into the background of scientific interest. Einstein expressed cautiously but appreciatively:

“It is not yet possible to say whether Kaluza's idea will prove itself, but it will have to be recognized as a genius.”

personality

Kaluza was an extraordinarily well-educated, polyglot person (he is said to have spoken or written up to 17 languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and others). He was also an unusually humble personality. He never made a secret of his rejection of National Socialist ideology , which is why his appointment to the Göttingen chair was only possible with difficulty and thanks to the protection of his Göttingen colleague Helmut Hasse . Curious things have been told from his private life: As a non-swimmer over 30 years old, he is said to have taught himself to swim just by reading a book and actually mastered it the first time he tried it in the water.

Theodor Kaluza's son was the mathematician and university professor Theodor Kaluza (1910-1994).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cities and administrative districts in Upper Silesia: City of Opole
  2. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Volume 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Series 3, volume 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 127.
  3. ↑ T. Kaluza: On the unity problem of physics . In: Meeting reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , 1921, pp. 966–972, archive.org .
personal data
SURNAME Kaluza, Theodor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaluza, Theodor Franz Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Opole , Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1954
Place of death Goettingen