Friedrich Beck (physicist)

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Friedrich Beck (born February 16, 1927 in Wiesbaden ; † December 20, 2008 ) was a German physicist.

School and study

As the son of the businessman Fritz Beck and his wife Margarete Cron, he attended the secondary school in Darmstadt . Then he began studying physics in Göttingen and at the TH Darmstadt . As a student of Max von Laue, he followed up on his work on the electrodynamic potential of a superconductor and, from the spring of 1950, developed his doctoral thesis on the subject of electrodynamic potential in the expanded phenomenological theory of superconductivity , with which he was appointed Dr. rer. nat. attained.

Studies, habilitation and lecturer

From 1952 to 1954 he worked as an assistant at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin. From 1954 to 1956 a research stay in the USA followed as a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the University of Cambridge (Massachusetts) . He then went to the University of Munich and obtained his habilitation there in 1958 with a topic on nuclear reactions as a result of electromagnetic interactions. From 1958 to 1960 he worked as a private lecturer at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg.

professorship

In 1960 he was appointed associate professor for theoretical physics at the University of Frankfurt . He went to the TH Darmstadt in 1963 as a full professor for theoretical physics, where he took over the management of the institute for theoretical nuclear physics in the same year . He taught at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1974 to 1975 as a visiting professor. This was followed in 1976 by a visiting professorship at the Universidade Federal Rural in Rio de Janeiro . In 1979 he taught as visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in College Park. A stay at the Weizmann Institute for Sciences in Rechowot followed in 1983 . In 1987 he was visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle . The following year he stayed at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva . In 1991 he taught as a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg . After being in 1995 retired , joined Jochen Wambach in 1996 to his successor.

Work areas

His main focus in the field of theoretical nuclear physics dealt with the application of many-body methods in the treatment of atomic nuclei . Further topics were the theory of nuclear matter and that of finite nuclei as well as quantum hadrodynamics . His last major work concerned the framework of the Collaborative Research Center 199 of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Molecular Ecophysiology of Plants: Material Acquisition, Membrane Transport and Regulation of Material Consumption .

Collaboration with John C. Eccles

In the early 1990s he and John Carew Eccles developed a model for explaining the control of synapses on the basis of quantum physics in the human brain. The corresponding work by Beck was his considerations on the tunnel effect in the activity of the synapses in exocytosis . This model developed with Eccles - also known as Beck-Eccles quantum mechanical model of exocytosis - should make it possible, based on an interactionist dualism , to explain how human consciousness influences the function of the electrons "tunneled" between the double lipid layer and the presynaptic endings Could have synapses.

Fonts

  • Quantum aspects of brain activity and the role of consciousness , in: Proc. Natn. Acad. Sci. USA 69 (1992) 11357-11361.
  • Quantum aspects of brain activity and the role of consciousness with JC Eccles in: JC Eccles How the self controls its brain , from the English by Malte Heim , Munich (Pipper) 1994, chap. 9 (pp. 213-241).
  • Quantum processes in the brain? A gateway to understanding awareness. A physical contribution to the control of neural processes , in: Lars Schuster, Jan C. Schmidt (Eds.), Der dethronte Mensch? - Inquiries from the neurosciences to our image of man, Paderborn 2003
  • Quantum Processes in the Brain: A scientific basis of consciousness with JC Eccles, in: N. Osaka (Ed.), Neural Basis of Consciousness, Amsterdam 2003
  • Synaptic Quantum Tunneling in Brain Activity , in: NeuroQuantology, Vol. 16, Issue 2, 2008, p 140-151

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Habel, Who is Who ?, Lübeck 1993
  2. ↑ Friedrich Beck, The electrodynamic potential in the expanded phenomenological theory of superconductivity, in: Zeitschrift für Physik A Hadrons and Nuclei, Vol. 29, Number 3 / May, 1951, p. 246-274
  3. ↑ Achim Richter , Professor Friedrich Beck on his 70th birthday, in: THD intern, Volume 18, Issue 2, 1997, p. 2.
  4. ↑ Werner Held: Quantum physical approaches of consciousness
  5. ↑ Synaptic Quantum Tunneling in Brain Activity, in: NeuroQuantology, Vol. 16, Issue 2, 2008, pp 140-151
personal data
SURNAME Beck, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden , Germany
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 2008