Boris Podolsky

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Boris Podolsky ( Russian Борис Яковлевич Подольский , scientific transliteration Boris Podol'skij ; born June 29, 1896 in Taganrog ; † November 28, 1966 in Cincinnati ) was an American physicist .

life and work

Boris Podolsky was born into a poor Jewish family in Taganrog. He emigrated from Russia to the USA in 1913 and received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1918 . After military service, he worked for the Los Angeles Power Company (Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light), but then resumed his studies. In 1926 he received his master’s degree in mathematics from USC and then studied physics at the California Institute of Technology , where he received his PhD in 1928 under Paul Sophus Epstein . He then spent a year as a post-doc at the University of Berkeley and one year at the University of Leipzig with grants from the National Science Foundation , among others . In 1930 he spent another year at Caltech with Richard Chace Tolman . There, in 1931, he started working with Albert Einstein . He then spent two years at the Physical-Technical Institute of Ukraine in Kharkov , where he worked with Wladimir Fock , Lev Landau and Paul Dirac , who was just visiting, on topics such as quantum electrodynamics . In 1933 he was back in the USA at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. From 1935 he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cincinnati and from 1961 at the Xavier University of Cincinnati .

Together with Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen , he devised the EPR experiment in 1935 , a thought experiment that is of great importance in discussions of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics . Podolsky was then (1934/35) with Einstein at the IAS. Her work appeared in Physical Review (vol. 47, 1935, p. 777) and was written by Podolsky.

According to a book published in 2009 that, among other things, refers to the Venona eavesdropping protocols, he was a spy who passed on technical details about the gas diffusion process for uranium enrichment to the Soviet Union .

In 1941 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

literature

  • Jagdish Mehra , Helmut Rechenberg : The historical development of quantum theory. Vol. 6, part 2, p. 717, short biography in footnote.
  • Boris Podolsky, Kaiser S. Kunz: Fundamentals of Electrodynamics. Marcel Dekker 1969.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ After Abraham Pais : Subtle is the Lord. Oxford University Press , p. 494, there is also a biography.
  2. ^ John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Alexander Vassiliev: Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. Boston: Yale University Press , 2009
personal data
SURNAME Podolsky, Boris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Подольский, Борис Яковлевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Taganrog
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1966
Place of death Cincinnati