Enrique Gaviola

Enrique Gaviola (born August 31, 1900 in Mendoza (Argentina) , † August 7, 1989 ibid), with full name Ramón Enrique Gaviola was an Argentine physicist who did research in Germany and the USA in addition to his home country. He began his career in the field of fluorescence spectroscopy , but was later referred to as "the first Argentine astrophysicist" and is considered the most important and famous scientist in Argentina of the first half of the 20th century.

Life

Studied in Argentina and Germany

Mendoza La Plata Buenos Aires Cordoba San Miguel de Tucuman Bariloche

Argentine stations in the life of Enrique Gaviola

Gaviola studied land surveying at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata , where the German professor of physics Richard Gans recommended that he study physics in Germany. In March 1922 he sailed to Europe, he studied in Göttingen and Berlin and learned the latest developments in quantum mechanics from six Nobel Prize winners - James Franck and Max Born in Göttingen, as well as Max Planck , Max von Laue , Walter Nernst and Albert Einstein in Berlin . He wrote a proseminar paper at von Laue; Lise Meitner , Albert Einstein and Ernst Pringsheim sat on his examination board . In Berlin he also wrote his doctoral thesis, according to one source at Pringsheim, and according to another at von Laue and Walter Nernst. The topic was fluorescence and phosphorescence in gases and solutions. On June 6, 1926, he was awarded a doctorate from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin . Einstein suggested Gaviola, is a Rockefeller grant to apply to at Robert W. Wood at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore ( USA work). The scholarship was initially refused because it was only intended for Europeans and North Americans. The scholarship was only granted following Einstein's personal intervention.

USA, Argentina, USA

Gaviola was according to a source from 1927 to 1929 with Wood, where he studied the quadratic Doppler effect and dealt with atomic spectroscopy . With the mediation of Gregory Breit , he then became an Assistant Professor at the Carnegie Institution in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, where he worked on high-energy particle acceleration. With Lawrence Hafstad and Merle Tuve , he built a 5 million volt device that is considered to be the forerunner of later particle accelerators . According to a second source, he was there from 1928 to mid-1929. This source also shows a newspaper photo of Hafstad, Tuve and Gaviola dated 1928.

In 1930 Gaviola went back to Argentina, to the Universidad de Buenos Aires . There he reformed the curriculum and advocated the promotion of experimental work. He also worked on the astronomical observatories of La Plata and Córdoba .

The Cordoba Observatory was in a difficult situation in 1935 and threatened with closure. Since 1909 it was planned to build a mirror that would have made the reflecting telescope the one with the largest diameter in the southern hemisphere. However, the creation could not be completed. So Gaviola went to see John D. Strong at the California Institute of Technology , a respected expert in building such mirrors. Together they developed a significantly improved and cheaper production method that was also well received in other areas.

The "Estación Astrofísica de Bosque Alegre" southwest of Córdoba.

In 1939 Gaviola oversaw the manufacture of the mirror, which he then built into the reflecting telescope at the Bosque Alegre Observatory. This branch of the Córdoba Observatory is located at an altitude of 1250 meters in the vicinity of the town of Alta Gracia , southwest of Córdoba. It opened in 1942.

Astronomer in Argentina

In 1940 he became the executive director of the Cordoba Observatory . In the following years he endeavored to advance the development of the physical sciences in Argentina, because before the 1940s there was no physical research in Latin America. He founded the Argentine Physical Society and was the first to propose an Argentine National Research Council. In order to enable a reform of the Argentine university education, he saw the need to send numerous students abroad to study.

During World War II, he sought to rescue European scientists, but found little support overall in the academic community and by the government. His attempts to get Juri Rumer , a Jewish-Soviet employee of Max Born, a job at the University of Buenos Aires were thwarted by the faculty management. However, a few years later in January 1942 he was able to hire the Italian physicist Andrea Levialdi at the observatory in Cordoba. In 1938 he fled with his wife and son from fascist Italy to France, and when the German army marched there, he went on to Barcelona in 1941. There the family boarded the last ship with Jewish refugees to South America. He also supported Guido Beck , depending on the source at Einstein's request, or based on a description by the German experimental physicist James Franck , who emigrated to the USA in 1933 . Beck was in Coimbra , Portugal when Gaviola contacted him. Beck arrived in Buenos Aires in May 1943 with another dollar and 50 escudos . In April Gaviola had secured Beck's appointment as the person responsible for the theoretical physics courses at the observatory in Cordoba. Beck's arrival marked the beginning of theoretical physics as a serious science, first in Argentina and later in Brazil. In Córdoba, Mario Bunge , Ernesto Sabato and José Antonio Balseiro were among his students. Gaviola was unable to find a job in Argentina for the Jewish-Polish mathematician Alfred Rosenblatt , who lives in Paris, but through his connections he managed to get a job at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru's capital Lima, where he set up a mathematical institute.

Gaviola was the first to contradict Ronald Richter's falsified fusion results , which were heavily promoted by the Argentine government under Juan Perón . After the experiments on Huemul Island in Lake Nahuel Huapi were stopped , Gaviola was able to convince the government to transfer the high-temperature plasma devices to the nearby mainland. In 1955, the Balseiro Institute , one of the most prestigious institutes in Latin America, was founded at the atomic center there in Bariloche .

In 1947 Gaviola was deposed as director of the observatory in Cordoba because of his criticism of the government, but reinstated in 1956 after a change of government. In 1957 he founded the Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy at the University of Cordoba and soon after that the Institute of Physics at the University of Tucumán . In 1963 he became a professor of experimental physics at the Balseiro Institute, which he helped found in 1955. In his later years, he found the climate in southern Argentina too strenuous, so he moved back to his native Mendoza before his 80th birthday.

Honors

• In recognition of its services to astronomy, the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid 2504, discovered in Córdoba in 1967, “Gaviola” in 1981 .
• For his work in physics and optics, the Universidad de La Plata awarded him the “Medalla de Oro Dr. Ricardo Gans “(gold medal Dr. Ricardo Gans).
• In 1980 he received the "Medalla de Oro" from the Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica (Center for Optical Research).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Viviana Bianchi: Breve biografía del Dr. Ramón Enrique Gaviola. In: Cielo Sur - Astronomía desde el Hemisferio Sur para todos. November 2003, archived from the original on June 30, 2006 ; accessed on November 16, 2019 (Spanish). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Omar Bernaola: La lista de Gaviola. In: Página / 12 . January 3, 2004, accessed November 16, 2019 (Spanish). 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Omar Bernaola, Veronica Grunfeld, LM Falicov: Enrique Gaviola . In: Physics Today . November 1990, p. 105-106 .
4. ^ ^{A b c d} José Luis Morán-López: Physics in Latin America Comes of Age . In: Physics Today . tape 53 , no. 10 , 2000, pp. 38-43 , doi : 10.1063 / 1.1325191 .
5. ↑ Guillermo Abramson: Gaviola en Alemania . In: EN Hoy . unknown p. 46 (Spanish, gov.ar [PDF]).