Arthur Gordon Webster

Arthur Gordon Webster (born November 28, 1863 in Brookline , Massachusetts , † May 15, 1923 in Worcester , Massachusetts) was an American physicist .

Webster studied mathematics and physics at Harvard University, graduating in 1885 as the best in his class. In the same year he continued his studies at the University of Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1890 under Hermann von Helmholtz . During this time he also studied in Paris and Stockholm. In 1892 he succeeded Albert A. Michelson as professor of physics at Clark University , where he was given a full professorship in 1900. Clark University was a leading physics school in the United States at the time. In 1923 he shot himself with a revolver. In a suicide note, he complained that his research had reached a dead end. Webster was skeptical of relativity and nascent quantum theory. One reason was probably also the fear that the new president of Clark University would close the physics faculty after the mathematics faculty.

Webster worked both experimentally and theoretically. His theoretical physics lectures were in book form and were some of the first such textbooks in their respective fields in the United States at the time. He developed a device for measuring sound intensity and researched gyroscopes. In 1895 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Today he is best known as the founder of the American Physical Society (APS), which was founded at Columbia University on May 20, 1899 at his invitation by twenty physicists. In 1903 Webster became president of the APS and inducted into the National Academy of Sciences .

At Clark University he had 27 PhD students. In 1898 he was Colloquium Lecturer of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) ( The partial differential equations of wave propagation ).

Fonts

• Theory of electricity and magnetism, being lectures on mathematical physics, London, Macmillan 1897, online
• The dynamics of particles and of rigid, elastic and fluid bodies: being lectures on mathematical physics, Leipzig, Teubner 1912, online
• The Partial Differential Equations of Mathematical Physics, 1927 (published posthumously), 2nd edition Teubner 1933 (editor Samuel J. Plimpton, Reprint Dover 1966)

Web links

• History of Physics at Clark University, Wester era

Remarks

1. ↑ The new President Wallace W. Atwood was a geographer from Harvard and replaced the mathematics professorships by expanding the geography faculty.