Wolfgang Finkelnburg

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Wolfgang Karl Ernst Finkelnburg (born June 5, 1905 in Bonn , † November 7, 1967 in Erlangen ) was a German experimental physicist.

Life

Wolfgang Finkelnburg was born in Bonn in 1905 as the son of the university professor Rudolf Finkelnburg (1870–1950) and his wife Margot Zitelmann. He was the grandson of the physician Carl Maria Finkelnburg . Finkelnburg attended a humanistic grammar school in Bonn and, after graduating from high school, studied physics and mathematics from 1924 at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the University of Bonn . During his studies he became a member of the Association of German Students in Bonn . In 1928 he received his doctorate from Heinrich Konen with a thesis on the spectrum of the hydrogen molecule. He was his assistant from 1928. In 1931 he became an assistant at the TH Karlsruhe , where he completed his habilitation with theoretician Walter Weizel and in 1932 he became a private lecturer. From 1933 to 1934 he was a Rockefeller Fellow with Robert Millikan at Caltech . In 1936 he became associate professor at the TH Darmstadt and from 1942 to 1945 associate professor and director of the Physics Institute at the University of Strasbourg , where he a. a. dealt with war-important research on carbon electrode arcs in flak headlights. Under his leadership, reactor technology was greatly expanded and our own nuclear power plants were built.

Finkelnburg had been a member of the NSDAP since 1937 and joined the NS Lecturer Association . Since 1938 he was a representative of the TH Darmstadt Lecturer Association, where he appeared, however, as an opponent of the " German Physics " demanded by Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark . In 1940 he organized the “Munich Religious Discussions” (based on the Augsburg Religious Discussions ). His aim was to provide support for the modern theoretical physics (quantum mechanics, special relativity theory) attacked by representatives of German physics in the classroom. The conversations between the philosophers of science from the Hugo Dingler circle and physicists invited by Finkelnburg ( Hans Kopfermann , Otto Scherzer , Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker , Otto Heckmann , Georg Joos ) took place on November 15, 1940 in the Munich Medical Center and were held in November 1942 continued in Seefeld in Tirol. They were successful for Finkelnburg and the physicists behind him (including industrial physicists and experimenters, for whom the use of quantum mechanics was a matter of course, but also the Heisenberg School). Carl Ramsauer , the President of the German Physical Society, made him his deputy in 1941 (together with Georg Joos). In 1942 Finkelnburg became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg .

After he could not find a suitable job in Germany, he was a visiting professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC from 1946 to 1952. He also worked at the Engineer Research and Development Laboratories in nearby Fort Belvoir of the US Army. In 1949 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1952 he returned to Germany and joined the Central Research and Development department at Siemens AG in Erlangen . He became department head in their research laboratories there. From 1957 he built up the department for nuclear reactor development at Siemens and became its head. In this position and as a member of the Bavarian and German Atomic Energy Commission , he campaigned for the construction of heavy water reactors for the production of plutonium and the construction of the multi-purpose research reactor in Karlsruhe . This was built from 1961 by the general contractor Siemens-Schuckertwerke . On October 1, 1963, Finkelnburg was appointed general representative of Siemenswerke.

In addition, since 1955 he was honorary professor for atomic physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. 1966 to 1967 he was President of the German Physical Society .

In addition to the areas of applied physics already mentioned (such as reactor technology), Finkelnburg dealt with high-temperature gas discharges (plasma physics), atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics and spectroscopy. His “Introduction to Atomic Physics”, which also deals with nuclear physics, molecular physics, elementary particle physics and solid state physics (the most common applications of quantum mechanics), was widely used.

Wolfgang Finkelnburg died in November 1967 of complications from cancer. He was buried in the castle cemetery in Bad Godesberg . He had been married to Eleonore Schülen (born 1910) since 1939. The physicist Wolf-Dieter Finkelnburg (born 1947) emerged from the marriage.

Honors

The Erlangen-Nuremberg University Association has been awarding a "Wolfgang Finkelnburg Habilitation Prize" to young scientists from the Technical Faculty of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg since 1975.

Fonts

  • Continuous spectra. Springer, 1938.
  • Physics, Freiburg, 1942.
  • Introduction to atomic physics. Springer, 1948. 12th edition 1967 (English Structure of Matter. Academic Press 1964.)
  • High current coal arc. Physics and technology of a high temperature arc discharge. Springer, 1948.
  • Atomic Physics. McGraw-Hill, 1950.
  • Introduction to the study of physics, Heidelberg 1950.
  • The physicist. Modern Industry, Munich, 1967.

literature

  • Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , pp. 47-48.
  • Wilhelm Walcher : Wolfgang Finkelnburg 60 years. In: Physical sheets. Vol. 21, 1965.
  • Christa Wolf and Marianne Viefhaus: Directory of professors at TH Darmstadt. Darmstadt 1977, p. 50.
  • Tilman Hanel: The bomb as an option. Motives for building a nuclear infrastructure in the Federal Republic up to 1963 . Klartext, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1283-0 , p. 264 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.familysearch.org
  2. ↑ Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 56.
  3. ↑ Title of the dissertation: On the molecular spectrum of hydrogen with wavelength measurements of 3667 lines between λ 4861 (Hβ) and 3314 ° A.-E. .
  4. ↑ z. B. Finkelnburg “Physics of High Temperatures”, Natural Sciences, Vol. 32, 1944, p. 105 and his book Der Hochstromkohlebogen 1948, after a book published in 1944 was only for official use. Finkelnburg achieved the highest urgency level "DE" for the research and worked together with Siemens-Schuckertwerke
  5. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 150.
  6. ^ Thomas Powers: Heisenberg's War. Hoffmann and Campe 1993, p. 439. Finkelnburg himself describes the processes in a manuscript from 1946 The fight against party physics , a copy of which is in Heisenberg's estate, printed in Klaus Hentschel (ed.): Physics and National Socialism. Birkhäuser 1996, p. 339.
  7. ↑ Seefeld 1942-1943 , Conference Notes and Reports, Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, Series IV: Alsos Mission , online on the American Institute of Physics website , Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
  8. ^ Letter to Sommerfeld dated May 28, 1947, quoted by Horst Kant
  9. ↑ APS Fellow Archive. Fellows 1949. American Physical Society, accessed December 15, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Finkelnburg, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Finkelnburg, Wolfgang Karl Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1967
Place of death gain