Arthur Beer

Arthur Beer (born June 28, 1900 in Reichenberg , Bohemia ; † October 20, 1980 in Cambridge , Great Britain ) was an Austro-Czech astronomer and astrophysicist who worked in England from 1933 .

Life

Beer was the son of the teacher Johan Beer and his wife Olga, geb. Pollak. After attending grammar school in Reichenberg and briefly participating in the First World War with the Imperial and Royal Army , he studied physics , astronomy , geophysics and philosophy at the universities of Leipzig, Vienna and Berlin. In 1924 he had to interrupt his studies due to polio . After undergoing an operation, he was able to walk again and complete his education. 1927 doctorate Beer with a thesis on spectroscopic binaries .

From 1928 Beer worked as an assistant at the Wroclaw University Observatory. At that time he was concerned with planetary radiation and worked on the second catalog of the Astronomical Society. In 1929 he moved to the Deutsche Seewarte in Hamburg, where he was employed as a tidal astronomer. For the North German radio station he also designed the program “From Nature and Technology”, one of the first scientific radio programs ever to be broadcast.

In the spring of 1930, Beer helped set up the “Modern Times” department in the permanent exhibition of the Hamburg planetarium . At that time he also contributed columns for various newspapers and gave lectures in the planetarium.

After the seizure of the Nazis in the spring of 1933. Beer was Jewish because of its (NS by definition) Appearance according to the Law for the Restoration of Civil displaced out of the public service. In 1934 he emigrated to Great Britain, where he got a job at Cambridge University thanks to the recommendations of Albert Einstein , Erwin Finlay-Freundlich and Fritz Saxl . There he carried out astrophysical research under FJM Stratton (1881-1960) at the Cambridge Solar Physics Observator in the following years . In between he also worked at the Mill Hill Observatory of University College London . He received financial support from the Academic Assistance Council .

After his emigration, Beer was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police. In the spring of 1940 that put him Reich Security Main Office on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who looked at the Nazi surveillance apparatus as particularly dangerous or important - which is why they in the event of a successful invasion of the British Isles by the armed forces of the following details of the SS as first sought and arrested.

After the outbreak of World War II , Beer was classified as a friendly alien because he had a Czechoslovak passport , so that he escaped internment and instead took on duties for the Ministry of Aviation .

From 1941 to 1945 Beer worked as a seismologist at the Kew Observatory. After that he was from 1946 - in the same year he was naturalized in Great Britain - until his retirement in 1967 as Senior Assistant Observer again in the service of the University Observatory in Cambridge. This activity was interrupted by research stays at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria , Canada, and as a visiting professor at Swarthmore College in the United States.

Since the early 1950s, Beer's supervision has produced the multi-volume work Vistas of Astronomy , a comprehensive synopsis of the knowledge of the field of astronomy at the time, to which he was able to win 215 scientists as contributors, including astronomers, mathematicians and historians. For the first two volumes of the Vistas , published in 1955 and 1956 (which were published until the 1990s), he acted as editor-in-chief.

Beer was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society and the International Astronomical Union . For his contributions to the history of astronomy, Beer received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Frankfurt in December 1970 (Doctor philosophiae naturalis honoris causa).

Beer is buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground cemetery in Cambridge.
The asteroid (1896) Beer was named after him.

family

Beer had been married to Charlotte Vera Popielarski since July 23, 1926. The marriage resulted in their son Peter Beer, who also became an astronomer, and their daughter Nova (* 1935).

Fonts

• To characterize the spectroscopic binary stars. 1927.
• The Spectrum of the Secondary Component of the Algol System. 1955.
• Vistas in Astronomy. 1965.
• The Radiant Universe. 1972.
• Copernicus: Yesterday and Today. Proceedings of the Commemorative Conference Held in Washington in Honor of Nicolaus Copernicus. 1975.

literature

• Who's who in Western Europe. 1981, p. 50.
• HW Duerbeck , P. Beer: Arthur Beer and his relationships with Einstein and the Warburg library. In: Contributions to the history of astronomy. Volume 8. Harri Deutsch, Thun / Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-8171-1771-0 , pp. 203-214.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Beer on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .