Yves Rocard

Yves-André Rocard (born May 22, 1903 in Vannes ; † March 16, 1992 in Paris ) was a French physicist who was instrumental in the development of the French atomic bomb.

Life

As the son of a professional officer who fell in World War I , Rocard grew up in modest circumstances. Dependent on scholarships during his studies, he was admitted to the École normal supérieure (ENS) in 1922 , to a doctorate in mathematics in 1927 and in physics in 1928. Working for a manufacturer of radio tubes, he invented, among other things, the indirectly heated cathode. Back in university, he received a call to the Sorbonne in 1939 and took over the physics laboratory of the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) until 1939.

During the Second World War he joined the Resistance , was flown to England and appointed research director of his navy by Charles de Gaulle . In this role he was interested for the first time in radio emissions from the sun as a source of interference for radars . When the Allied armies invaded Germany in 1945, he captured German specialists in the French occupation zone, but came too late to Hechingen , where the German nuclear researchers of the uranium project , including Otto Hahn , Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker , had saved themselves. They had already been interned at Farm Hall in England by Samuel Abraham Goudsmit and Boris Pash as part of Operation Epsilon . Rocard valued the military German ionospheric forecast service, founded a corresponding service of the French Navy and hired Karl Rawer as its scientific director (1946-1956).

In order to eliminate the politically unreliable Frédéric Joliot-Curie there, Rocard was appointed chief scientist of the military part of French nuclear research in 1947 and took part in the development of the French atomic and hydrogen bomb.

He founded the Nançay radio astronomical observatory. His laboratory developed the first linear particle accelerator for the CEA in Orsay . Rocard later became interested in unexplained natural phenomena such as the divining rod or the orientation of migratory birds. Although he sought rational explanations, he came into conflict with the powerful Union rationalist .

Yves Rocard is the father of the French Prime Minister from 1988 to 1991 Michel Rocard (1930–2016).

Works

• L'hydrodynamique et la théorie cinétique des gaz . Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1932.
• Diffusion de la lumière et visibilité, projecteurs, feux, instruments d'observation . Paris, 1935.
• Propagation et absorption du son. Paris: Hermann, 1935.
• La stabilité de route des locomotives. Paris: Hermann, 1935.
• The phenomena d'auto-oscillation in the hydraulic installations . Paris: Hermann, 1937.
• Théorie des oscillateurs . Paris, 1941.
• Dynamique general of vibration . Paris: Masson, 1951.
• Le signal you sourcier . Dunod 1962.
• Electricity. Paris: Masson, 1966.
• Thermodynamique. Paris: Masson, 1967
• L'instabilité en mécanique; automobiles, avions, ponts suspendus . Paris: Masson, 1954.
• Mémoires without concessions . Paris: Grasset, 1988.
• La science et les sourciers; baguettes, pendules, biomagnétisme . Paris: (Dunod 1989, ISBN 2-10002996-7 )
• La stabilité de route des locomotives . With Julien, M. Paris: Hermann, 1935.
• Les Sourciers (Que sais-je, n ° 1939, ISBN 2-13043539-4 ).
• The diffusion moléculaire de la lumière . With Jean Cabannes. PUF, 1931.