Edgar Meyer (physicist)

Portrait of the physicist Edgar Meyer (Zurich Central Library)

Edgar Meyer (born March 5, 1879 in Bonn , † February 29, 1960 in Zurich ) was a German physicist .

Life

Edgar Meyer was born on March 5, 1879 in Bonn as the son of the textile manufacturer and businessman Michael Meyer (1838–1903) and Maria, née Hirz. After graduating from high school in Bonn, Meyer began studying physics with Emil Warburg in Berlin , which he completed in the winter semester of 1902/03 with a dissertation on the absorption of ultraviolet light in ozone .

He then worked until the summer of 1907 as an assistant to Paul Drude at the Physics Institute of the University of Berlin. The following winter semester Edgar Meyer took a assistant position at the Physics Institute of the University of Zurich in Alfred Little and habilitated there in the summer of 1908. Between 1909 and 1912 he worked as a lecturer and assistant from 1910 as honorary professor at the Physics Institute of the Technical University of Aachen in Johannes Stark works. In 1912 Meyer finally accepted a position as associate professor for theoretical physics at the University of Tübingen , where he was employed until the winter semester of 1915/16.

Meyer then followed a call to the University of Zurich as full professor of experimental physics and director of the Institute of Physics, after he had previously rejected an offer to Göttingen . Meyer held this position until his retirement in 1949.

He had been married to Elsa (1884–1964), daughter of Benjamin Löwenberg from Berlin , since 1905 . Edgar Meyer, who converted from the Jewish to the Reformed faith together with his wife in 1911 , died in Zurich on February 29, 1960, a few days before he was 81.

Act

Edgar Meyer became known through a study published in 1908 with Erich Regener , in which evidence was provided that radioactive decay is a statistical process, a fact that was by no means taken for granted at the time. In connection with this work he gave a way to precisely determine the electrical elementary charge .

Edgar Meyer's subsequent research interests spanned a considerable part of the physics of the time, including spectroscopy , physics of gas discharges, photoelectric effects and ultrasound . He dealt very intensively with spectroscopy in the ultraviolet and visible part of the spectrum. Further investigations concerned the determination of the ozone content of the air by means of absorption measurements in the ultraviolet. Edgar Meyer kept coming back to the question of the permeability of the earth's atmosphere to the short-wave ultraviolet radiation of the sun in the area of ​​the gap between the absorption bands of ozone and oxygen.

In addition, Edgar Meyer was the first to hold lecture demonstrations on a larger scale. He also rejected the then customary separation between experimental physics and theoretical physics. In 1921 he persuaded the faculty in Zurich to appoint Erwin Schrödinger , who was still unknown at the time, to the vacant chair for theoretical physics. After his retirement he devoted himself to archaeological studies and traveling.

Works (selection)

• Absorption of ultraviolet radiation in ozone. Dissertation, 1903
• The photoelectric effect on ultra-microscopic metal parts. In: Annalen der Physik 45. pp. 177–236, with Walther Gerlach
• Report on the differences in the fluctuations in radioactive radiation over time. In: Yearbook of Radioactivity and Electronics 5. 1908, pp. 423–450.
• Attempts to diffract light by ultrasonic waves. In: Helvetica Physica Acta 6. 1933, pp. 242–244, with Richard Bär
• Permeability of the earth's atmosphere to solar radiation with a wavelength of 2144 Å. In: Helvetica Physica Acta 14. 1941, pp. 625-632.

literature

• Walther Gerlach: In: Helvetica Physica Acta 22. pp. 97-99.
• Walther Gerlach: In: Physikalische Blätter 15. 1959, p. 136.
• Walther Gerlach: In: Vierteljahresschrift der Naturkundlichen Gesellschaft Zürich 105. 1960, p. 328 f.
• Klaus Clusius : In: University of Zurich. Yearbook 1958/59. Pp. 90-92.
• Hans Bömmel:  Meyer, Edgar. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 331 f. ( Digitized version ).