Friedrich Georg Houtermans

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Fritz Houtermans in the laboratory of the Physics Institute of the Georg-August University in Göttingen , 1927

Fritz Houtermans (born January 22, 1903 in Sopot near Danzig ; † March 1, 1966 in Bern ), born as Friedrich Georg Houtermans, pseudonym Friedrich Beck or F. Beck, was a German physicist (astro and nuclear physicist) and university professor .

family

He was the son of the in Sopot living doctorate lawyers and bankers Otto Houtermans (1878-1936), however, has grown since 1906-07 in Vienna with his single mother, the doctoral chemist Elsa Houtermans (1878-1942), born Wanek on. She also taught German, French and Latin.

Fritz Houtermans married four times. His first wife was his fellow student Charlotte , née Riefenstahl, whom he married in 1930 in the Caucasus . The marriage resulted in two children, Giovanna (* 1933 in Berlin), called "Bamsi", and Jan (* April 11, 1935 in Charkow).

In 1944 he married Ilse Bartz, a chemist who worked with him at Manfred von Ardenne's private research institute in Berlin-Lichterfelde . Prior to this, he had divorced his first wife, Charlotte, under current Nazi marriage law, without informing her. This led to the charge of bigamy against Fritz Houtermans until the post-war period . Legally, this unilateral “remote separation” was possible under the National Socialist law then applicable because the National Socialists had created a regulation that was originally intended to make it easier for so-called “ Aryan ” spouses to quickly separate from “non-Aryan” spouses. The consent of both spouses to this type of divorce was therefore not required according to Nazi marriage law; the absence of a spouse for several years (separate from home and bed) was sufficient. Since Charlotte Houtermans had been in the USA since 1939, there was nothing in the way of the separation from a legal point of view, although she (unlike her husband) had no "Aryan" problem at all.

He had three children with his second wife. After the end of the war he met his first wife Charlotte again and remarried her in 1953. However, this marriage only lasted a few months. In 1955 he married Lore Müller, with whom they had another child.

His first child, Giovanna Fjelstad-Houtermans, graduated from Harvard University and taught as a professor of mathematics in Northfield, Minnesota. Jan Houtermans became a physicist at the University of California in Berkeley, California .

School and study

In Vienna, Fritz Houtermans attended the Academic Gymnasium , but was expelled from it after reciting the Communist Manifesto in the foyer on May 1, 1919 . For his last two years at school, the primary school student ended up in the reform-pedagogical rural education home Freie Schulgemeinde in Wickersdorf in the Thuringian Forest and passed his final exam in 1921 as an external student at the secondary school in Sonneberg . Fritz studied physics at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from 1922 to 1928 and received his doctorate with a dissertation on the fluorescence of bands in mercury vapor under James Franck .

Act

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Houterman's doctoral supervisor James Franck (4th from left), Robert Williams Wood (5th from left), Fritz Houtermans (6th from left) and Hertha Sponer (7th from left) in front of the Physics Institute of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , 1927

From 1928 to 1933 Houtermans worked as an assistant to the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Gustav Hertz at the Technical University in Berlin . During this time he published together with RE Atkinson in the journal for physics a famous work on the question of the structure of the elements in stars, which represents an important step towards the understanding of the formation of elements and the release of energy in stars.

Because of his left political stance and his membership in the Communist Party , Houtermans had to emigrate to England in 1933 after the Nazis came to power . There he worked at His Master's Voice , a well-known company in the music business. Apparently dissatisfied with his situation there and also because of his pro-communist attitude, Houtermans went to the Soviet Union in 1935 and was employed there at the Ukrainian Physics-Technical Institute in Kharkov .

On December 1, 1937, however, Houtermans was a victim of the Stalin purges and arrested in Moscow. After two years in prison, he was extradited to Germany in 1940 on the basis of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , where he was again imprisoned by the Gestapo . However, the physicist Max von Laue was able to exercise his influence, bring about his release and get him a job at Manfred von Ardenne's private research institute in Berlin. There he carried out important research work after a short time, which he summarized in the secret research report On the Issue of Nuclear Chain Reactions (1941). This report Houtermans says, before the discovery of plutonium by Glenn T. Seaborg and his associates, new elements heavier than uranium ( transuranic ), and pointed to the possibility to use these elements to produce energy. Although this report was accessible to government agencies and to some of the physicists organized in the uranium project , it does not seem to have had any influence on the German nuclear project.

After a short period from 1944 to 1945 at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin, Houtermans was again employed in Göttingen until 1952, where he began, among other things, to determine the age of rocks. In 1950, Houtermans and KF Schteppa, one of his fellow sufferers in Soviet captivity, wrote a book under the pseudonyms F. Beck and W. Godin, entitled Russian Purge and The Extraction of Confession, in which they talked about their experiences in Soviet prisons to report.

From 1952 until his death in 1966, Houtermans held a professorship at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern , Switzerland . Among other things, he dealt there with geochemistry , cosmochemistry , cosmic radiation , thermoluminescence and meteorite research and, as director, gave the Institute of Physics an international reputation. He calculated using uranium-lead dating , based on uranium-lead isotope data of the meteorite Canon Diablo, which had been measured by Clair Cameron Patterson , an age of about 4.5 billion years and published this in December 1953. This was one of the first publications in which today's generally accepted age was mentioned. Friedrich Begeman, at the time a doctoral student at Houtermans, reports that Patterson had previously calculated the age of the earth himself, again using Houtermans' mathematical models, and presented it in September 1953 at a conference on Nuclear Processes in Geologic Settings in Williams Bay, Wisconsin published in the Proceedings . Patterson published the ages he had determined for some meteorites and the earth in several articles in scientific journals in 1955 and 1956.

Honors

In 1973 the moon crater Houtermans was named after him.

The European Association of Geochemistry has presented the Houtermans Award annually since 1990 .

literature

  • Dieter Hoffmann: A physicist between Hitler and Stalin. In: Spektrum der Wissenschaft Issue 2, 2014, pp. 62–70.
  • Edoardo Amaldi : The Adventurous Life of Friedrich Georg Houtermans, Physicist (1903-1966). In: Giovanni Battimelli & Giovanni Paoloni (Eds.): 20th Century Physics. Essays and Recollections. A Selection of Historical Writings. World Scientific, 1998, ISBN 981-02-2369-2
  • Viktor J. Frenkel: Professor Friedrich Houtermans. Work, life, destiny. Biography of a physicist of the twentieth century. Edited and supplemented by Dieter Hoffmann. Preprint 414, MPI History of Science, 2011 ( PDF ; Russian original: St. Petersburg 1997)
  • Iosif B. Khriplovich : The Eventful Life of Fritz Houtermans. In: Physics Today. Volume 45, Issue 7, 1992, pp. 29-37.
  • Konrad Landrock: Friedrich Georg Houtermans (1903–1966). A great physicist of the 20th century. In: Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau . Volume 56, Issue 4, 2003, pp. 187-199; ( PDF; 583 kB )
  • Reinhard Müller : curriculum vitae as a legend. Friedrich Houtermans: physicist, Soviet spy, NKVD and Gestapo prisoner. In: exile. Research, knowledge, results. 2010, no. 2, pp. 66-91.
  • Thomas Powers: Heisenberg's War. The secret history of the German atomic bomb. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1993
  • Martin W. Teucher :  Houtermans, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 661 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Martin W. Teucher: Houtermans, Fritz . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie , Volume 9 (1972), p. 661 f., On: deutsche-biographie.de
  2. ↑ a b Konrad Landrock: Friedrich Georg Houtermans (1903–1966) - an important physicist of the 20th century (PDF file; 583 kB). In: Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau , Volume 56, Issue 4 (2003), pp. 187–199.
  3. ^ Misha Shifman: Standing Together in Troubled Times. Unpublished Letters by Pauli, Einstein, Franck and Others . World Scientific Publishing, Hackensack, New Jersey 2017, ISBN 978-981-3201-00-2 , p. 222.
  4. ↑ Charlotte Houtermans . In: Deutsche Biographie , on: deutsche-biographie.de
  5. ↑ Iosif B. Khriplovich: The Eventful Life of Fritz Houtermans . In: Physics Today , 45, 7, 29 (1992).
  6. ↑ Ann M. Hentschel: The Physical Tourist: Peripatetic Highlights in Bern (PDF file; 3.9 MB). In: Physics in Perspective , Vol. 7, Issue 1 (March 2005), pp. 107–129 (citations pp. 123–124).
  7. ^ A b Viktor J. Frenkel: Professor Friedrich Houtermans - Work, Life, Fate. Biography of a twentieth century physicist (PDF file; 9.8 MB), pp. 9, 13, 44, 115, 117, 31, 40, 42, 46, 51, 56, 57, 62, 63, 64, 65 , 73, 74, 104, 105, 110. In: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science , at: mpiwg-berlin.de
  8. ↑ Edoardo Amaldi: The Adventurous Life of Friedrich Georg Houtermans, Physicist (1903–1966) , Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin / New York 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-32854-1 , p. 81.
  9. ↑ During the Nazi era , Fritz Houtermans was considered a “ second degree hybrid ” because his maternal grandmother was of Jewish descent. This belonged to the Karplus family from Vienna . Quoted from: Konrad Landrock: Friedrich Georg Houtermans (1903–1966) - an important physicist of the 20th century (PDF file; 583 kB). In: Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau , Volume 56, Issue 4 (2003), pp. 187–199.
  10. ↑ Lt. a note on the birth entry of Charlotte Houtermans geb. Riefenstahl is the 2nd marriage with Fritz Houtermans in Bern (Switzerland) under the register no. 942/1953, vol. 1953, p. 942; Source: Bielefeld City Archives, inventory 104.2.20 / registry office, civil status register, no.100-1899.1: Bielefeld birth register 1899, vol. 1, no. 840/1899.
  11. ^ Misha Shifman: Standing Together in Troubled Times. Unpublished Letters by Pauli, Einstein, Franck and Others . World Scientific Publishing, Hackensack, New Jersey 2017, ISBN 978-981-3201-00-2 , p. 27.
  12. ↑ Jan Houtermans: On the quantitative relationships between geophysical parameters and the natural C14 inventory , on: worldcat.org
  13. ↑ Houtermans dossier, including his curriculum vitae, signed by FG ​​Houtermans in 1951, including a list of his published original work. In: University Archives Bern. In: Bern State Archives, signature BB8.l.329.
  14. ↑ FG Houtermans: About the band fluorescence of mercury vapor . In: Journal of Physics . tape 41 , no. 2-3 , June 1927, pp. 140-154 , doi : 10.1007 / BF01391923 .
  15. ^ RE Atkinson & FG Houtermans: On the question of the structure of the elements in stars. In: Journal of Physics. 54, 1929, pp. 656-665
  16. ↑ Determination of the Age of the Earth from the Isotopic Composition of Meteoritic Lead. In: Nuovo Cimento. 10, 1953, pp. 1623-1633, doi: 10.1007 / BF02781658
  17. ^ UB Marvin: Oral histories in meteoritics and planetary sciences: VIII Friedrich Begemann. In: Meteoritics & Planetary Sciences. 37, 2002, pp. B69-B77.
  18. ^ C. Patterson: The Pb 207 / Pb 206 Ages of some stone meteorites. In: Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta. 7, 1955, pp. 151-53
  19. ↑ C. Patterson, G. Tilton & M. Inghram: Age of the Earth. In: Science . 212, 1955, pp. 69-75
  20. ^ C. Patterson: Age of meteorites and the Earth. In: Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 10, 1956, pp. 230-237
personal data
SURNAME Houtermans, Friedrich Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Houtermans, Fritz; Houtermans, Friedrich; Houtermans, F .; Khoutermans, Fridrikh; Beck, Friedrich; Beck, F .; Хоутерманс, Фридрих Оттович; Хоутерманс, Фрідріх
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH January 22, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Sopot near Gdansk
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1966
Place of death Bern , Switzerland