Evry Schatzman

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Evry Léon Schatzman (born September 16, 1920 in Neuilly-sur-Seine , † April 25, 2010 in Paris ) was a French astrophysicist .

Life

His father Benjamin Schatzman was a dentist and immigrated to France from Romania via Palestine . In 1939 Evry Schatzman began studying at the École normal supérieure . His father was a Jew victim of the National Socialists in 1941 and Evry Schatzman had to go into hiding temporarily in order not to become a victim of the Wehrmacht himself . In 1943 he worked at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence . In the same year he married Ruth Fischer; the two had three children (Anne, David and Michelle). After returning to Paris in 1944, he acquired his agrégation in physics, became a scientist at the Center national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), where he received his doctorate in 1946. At the Institute for Astrophysics in Paris, he did research in particular on white dwarfs , which he then saw as the cause of supernovae . His explanations, which contradicted the thesis put forward by Fritz Zwicky before the Second World War , that a supernova is the result of a gravitational collapse , prove to be wrong. In 1947 he was invited by Bengt Strömgren at the University of Copenhagen , where he studied the atmosphere of white dwarfs. He then did research at Princeton University , where he also began to study star atmospheres . In 1949 he proposed a mechanism for heating the solar corona with shock waves .

Schatzman was from 1954 for 27 years professor at the Faculté des Sciences of Paris and received the first chair for astrophysics in France at the Sorbonne . From 1970 he was at the University of Paris VII (Denis Diderot), where he stayed until 1976. He also taught regularly at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he was professor from 1949 to 1976. He worked at the observatory in Paris-Meudon from 1969 and was the founder of the laboratory for astrophysics in Meudon in 1964. From 1976 he was research director of the CNRS at the observatory in Nice , which he stayed until 1988, after which he moved back to the observatory in Meudon. From 1984 to 1988 he was a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley . Towards the end of his career he was involved in the GALLEX experiment for the detection of solar neutrinos.

In addition to the already mentioned research directions, Schatzman dealt in particular with the internal structure of stars, the role of turbulent diffusion , the magnetohydrodynamics of star rotation, the acceleration mechanisms for cosmic rays and the theory of novae . He founded the teaching of theoretical astrophysics at French universities in the 1950s.

In 1985 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences . He was also a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Liège and the Academia Europaea . He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona . Schatzman received the Prix ​​Peccot-Vimont des Collège de France , the Prix ​​Félix Robin (1971) and the Holweck Prize (1975) of the French Physical Society, the Prix ​​Janssen of the French Astronomical Society (1973) and the CNRS Gold Medal in 1983 . In 1971 he received the Prix ​​Paul et Marie Stroobant of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences. He was a knight of the Legion of Honor and the Ordre national du Mérite and commander of the Palmes Académiques .

After the war he was briefly active in the French Communist Party. From 1970 to 2001 he was President of the Union rationaliste, an association of French scientists founded on the initiative of Paul Langevin in 1930 who are committed to the separation of religion and teaching and against supernatural and obscurantist models of explanation.

Fonts

  • with Françoise Praderie: Les Étoiles , InterEdition - Éditions du CNRS, 1990 (English translation: The Stars , Springer Verlag 1993)
  • Les Enfants d'Uranie: à la recherche des civilizations extraterrestres , éd. Le Seuil, 1986,
  • La Science menacée , éd. Odile Jacob, 1989
  • Le Message du photon voyageur , éd. Belfond, 1987
  • with Jean-Claude Pecker: Astrophysique générale , Masson & Cie, 1959
  • Origine et évolution of the moon , éd. Albin Michel, 1957
  • Our expanding universe , McGraw Hill 1992
  • Origin et évolution des mondes , Paris, A. Michel 1957 (English translation: The origin and evolution of the universe , Basic Books 1965)
  • White Dwarfs , North Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1957
  • Science et Societé , Edition Robert Laffont 1971

literature

  • Evry Schatzman: The desire to understand the world , Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 34, 1996, pp. 1–34, doi : 10.1146 / annurev.astro.34.1.1 (English; with picture)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Schatzman, Evry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schatzman, Evry Léon (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuilly-sur-Seine
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 2010
Place of death Paris