Alexis Thérèse Petit

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Alexis Thérèse Petit (born October 2, 1791 in Vesoul , † June 21, 1820 in Paris ) was a French physicist .

Life

Alexis Thérèse Petit attended the École Centrale in Besançon with great success and switched to a private school in Paris, where he was taught by teachers trained at the École polytechnique . At the age of ten, in 1801, AT Petit was already qualified enough to be accepted as a student at the École polytechnique in Paris. Nevertheless, the formal entry requirements were designed so that he could only be accepted at the age of 16. So he had to wait five years. He attended the same class at the École in 1807 as the French mathematician, engineer and physicist Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788-1867), who was almost three years older than Petit. He received his PhD in 1811 for his outstanding dissertation on capillary action, Théorie Mathématique de l'Action Capillaire . Petit was later at the École Polytechnique as professor of physics successor to the French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). In 1818 the Philomathic Society in Paris elected him a member.

Petit married in November 1814 one of the sisters of Dominique François Jean Arago (1786-1853). His brother-in-law was also a physicist, but also a politician. His young wife died of tuberculosis in April 1817 . Shortly afterwards, Petit himself also showed traces of early age and an incurable chest pain, to which he succumbed in June 1820 at the age of only 28 years. Students of the École Polytechnique erected a memorial to him on his grave.

The lunar crater Petit was named after him in 1976.

Scientific achievements

AT Petit and François Arago experimented together, for example on the refraction of light in gases. In particular, they investigated the influence of temperature on the refractive index of gases. When AT Petit studied physics at the École Polytechnique, it was taught that light is composed of corpuscles . However, his joint work with brother-in-law François Arago in 1815 gave him a different view of the nature of light, and in December of that year he became a proponent of the wave theory of light .

In 1819 he formulated the Dulong-Petit rule together with Pierre Louis Dulong (1785-1838) .

Works

  • Petit, AT; Dulong, PL: Recherches sur quelques points importants de la théorie de la chaleur . In: Annales de Chimie et de Physique. Vol. 10, 1819, pp. 395-413.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Investigations on important points in heat theory, from the Annales de Chimie et de Physique 10, 395–413 (1819); in English
personal data
SURNAME Petit, Alexis Thérèse
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1791
PLACE OF BIRTH Vesoul
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 1820
Place of death Paris