Ernest J. Sternglass

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Ernest J. Sternglass (born September 24, 1923 in Berlin , † February 12, 2015 in Ithaca , New York ) was an American physicist .

Life

Sternglass' parents were Jewish doctors. The family left Germany in 1938 when he was fourteen and emigrated to the United States . He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and attended an engineering education program at Cornell University . Financial problems forced him to interrupt his studies for a year. When he returned to Cornell, the United States had entered World War II . Sternglass volunteered for the Navy. His ship ran out when the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima .

After the end of the war he married. In 1947 his first son was born. Sternglass died of heart failure on February 12, 2015, at the age of 91 at his home in Ithaca, New York .

job

In Washington , he worked as a civilian employee at the Navy Artillery Laboratory, which researched military weapons. Sternglass was working on night vision devices and he got the chance to meet Albert Einstein .

From 1952 he worked at the Westinghouse research laboratory , where he was head of the Apollo program from 1960 to 1967 . In 1962 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

He was Professor Emeritus of Radiation Science at the University of Pittsburgh and holder of thirteen patents .

Sternglass has been dealing with low radiation since 1963 and since then has been one of the pioneers who drew attention to its great dangers. In Germany, he was an expert in the processes surrounding the Wyhl am Kaiserstuhl nuclear power plant and appeared at low-radiation events with Jens Scheer in the early 1990s .

In the USA he acted as an expert on the nuclear power plant opposition against the Millstone nuclear power plant . He found, among other things, that the strontium doses in goat's milk 8 km north of the power plant site (with two reactor blocks left) showed higher values ​​around the year 2000 than during the above-ground A-bomb tests in the early 1960s.

In elementary particle physics, Sternglass was of the opinion that the J / Psi meson is an energetically highly excited state of an electron pair. In his cosmology he advocates the thesis that our universe emerged from a sequence of big bang events (“cosmic fireworks”).

Works

  • Low Level Radiation (1972, German translation: Radioactive "low" radiation, Berlin 1977)
  • Damage caused by low radiation (1975, in: Holger Strohm (Ed.): Why even low levels of radioactivity are life-threatening, Frankfurt / Main 1986)
  • Secret Fallout. Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island (1981)
  • Before the Big Bang. The Origins of the Universe (1997)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Blaine Friedlander: Physicist Ernest Sternglass dies at 91. Obituary on the Cornell University homepage on February 17, 2015 (accessed February 21, 2015).
  2. ↑ Kenneth Chang: Ernest Sternglass, Physicist and Nuclear Critic, Dies at 91. In: The New York Times, February 20, 2015 (accessed February 21, 2015).
  3. ^ Obituary on the Millstone opposition website
personal data
SURNAME Sternglass, Ernest J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 2015
Place of death Ithaca , New York