Amos de Shalit
Amos de Shalit (born September 29, 1926 in Palestine , † September 2, 1969 ) was an Israeli theoretical nuclear physicist and science organizer.
life and career
From 1947 De Shalit fought in the Israeli War of Independence in the Haganah . He studied at the Hebrew University and the ETH Zurich , where he did his doctorate with Paul Scherrer . After postdoctoral stays at Princeton University , Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he was visiting professor at Hebrew University in 1956. In 1957/58 he was a Ford Foundation Fellow at CERN . He became a professor at the Hebrew University and headed its physics faculty from 1961 to 1963, but was at the same time at the Weizmann Institute from 1954 , whose institute for nuclear physics he founded and headed in 1954. He was scientific director and from 1966 to 1968 director of the Weizmann Institute. Shortly before his untimely death from pancreatitis , he became head of a newly established department for scientific education at the Weizmann Institute. He was also active at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste .
De Shalit is best known for his work on the shell model of atomic nuclei, about which he wrote a textbook with Igal Talmi (also a professor at the Weizmann Institute). He also wrote a monograph on theoretical nuclear physics with Herman Feshbach , which was only published posthumously in 1974. Like Giulio Racah before (also in Israel, another important researcher in Israel in this area was Harry Lipkin ) he applied group theoretical methods to the nuclear structure and investigated diffraction phenomena of nuclear scattering. As a scientific advisor at CERN, he ensured that high-energy accelerator experiments on the core structure were also taken into account at the synchrotron (and was one of the first to suggest such experiments for nuclear physics) and, with Victor Weisskopf, organized conferences on this at CERN from 1963 onwards.
In 1965 he and Talmi received the Israel Prize for their work on the shell model.
He was also involved in the Israeli nuclear technology or nuclear weapons program. In the 1960s he was a regular companion of US delegations to the nuclear reactor in Dimona .
At the end of the 1950s, De Shalit was one of the initiators for closer cooperation between the Weizmann Institute and the Israeli scientists in general with the Federal Republic of Germany, which resulted in a visit by a delegation with Otto Hahn (the then director of the Max Planck Society ), Feodor Lynen and Wolfgang Gentner (whom de Shalit knew from CERN) began in Israel in 1959.
In 1969 de Shalit was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . A grammar school in Rechovot is named after him, a chair for theoretical physics and a series of lectures for visiting professors at the Weizmann Institute. The Amos-de-Shalit-Foundation, founded in 1974, promotes interest in science among young people through lectures, summer schools, grants, a prize for physics teachers and workshops.
He is the father of the mathematician Ehud de Shalit .
Fonts
- with Igal Talmi: Nuclear Shell Theory , Academic Press 1963, Dover 2004
- Editor with Léon Van Hove , Herman Feshbach: Preludes in theoretical physics. Essays in honor of VF Weisskopf , North Holland 1966
- with Herman Feshbach: Theoretical nuclear physics , Vol. 1 (Nuclear Structure), Wiley 1974
- with Philip Morse (editor): Nuclear, particle and many body physics, Academic Press 1972
- Scientific research in smaller countries: the example of Israel, Cologne, Westdeutscher Verlag 1966, Working Group for Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Vol. 166
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ List of participants in the Israeli nuclear weapons program . Afterwards he was one of the physicists who Israel sent abroad to study nuclear physics (and nuclear technology) from the late 1940s, as were Harry Lipkin and his colleague Igal Talmi.
- ↑ Dietmar Nickel in Dieter Hoffmann, Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr (Ed.) Wolfgang Gentner and the establishment of German-Israeli scientific relations , in Wolfgang Gentner , Springer Verlag 2006
- ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 15, 2016
- ↑ the second volume was only written by Feshbach, deals with nuclear reactions and did not appear until 1991
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | De Shalit, Amos |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Israeli physicist and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 29, 1926 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | League of Nations mandate for Palestine |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2nd September 1969 |