Fritz Reiche

Fritz Reiche (born July 4, 1883 in Berlin ; † January 14, 1969 in New York City ) was a German theoretical physicist who lived and worked in the USA from 1941.

Life

Reiche studied in Munich (1901–1902) with Adolf von Baeyer and Wilhelm Röntgen and then in Berlin with Max Planck , where he received his doctorate in 1907; Title of the dissertation: Laws of the compression of a cavity radiation by a "semipermeable" plate . After a three-year stay with Otto Lummer in Breslau, he returned to Berlin University in 1911, where he soon became a private lecturer. In 1913 he married Berta Ochs, the daughter of the composer and choirmaster of the Philharmonic Siegfried Ochs . For health reasons he did not become a soldier; from 1915 to 1918 he was an assistant at Planck as the successor to Lise Meitner , then he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for physical chemistry and electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. During this time he mainly worked in the field of theoretical optics (especially spectroscopy). In 1921 he was appointed professor for theoretical physics at the University of Breslau, as the successor to Erwin Schrödinger . In Breslau Reiche began to deal more intensively with quantum theory. He lost his position in Breslau in 1933 due to the anti-Jewish measures of the Nazi government; He was initially a visiting professor at the German University in Prague, but returned to Berlin in 1935 and finally emigrated with his family to the USA in 1941. He initially held various lectureships before becoming a professor at New York University in 1946 . There he taught theoretical physics , wave mechanics and thermodynamics . He has also been entrusted with special research projects on supersonic flow by NASA and the US Navy . After his retirement in 1958, he continued his research in the Division of Electromagnetic Research at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Until shortly before his death in 1969 he investigated the difference in the number of modes of wave propagation in magnetohydrodynamics and electrodynamics .

Rich role in the history of the atomic bomb

As Robert Jungk reports in his book Heller than a thousand suns , the physicist Friedrich Georg Houtermans sought out Fritz Reiche shortly before he left for the USA in March 1941 and brought him a secret message that Reiche was to deliver as a courier to the physicists in the USA. It was the atomic bomb. The German physicists would be urged by the Nazi government to build an atomic bomb, but they would try - Heisenberg in particular - to handle the matter hesitantly and would not seriously advance the contract. According to Jungk's account, Reiche brought this news to Rudolf Ladenburg , whom Reiche knew from Berlin and Breslau; he forwarded them to Washington. As the scientific appendix to the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Göttingen 2001) shows, there are strong doubts as to whether Heisenberg and his group actually wanted to thwart the construction of the bomb. In this respect, the truth of Jungk's description of Reich's role is in the dark.

Publications

Fritz Reiche has published 55 scientific papers, mostly articles in specialist journals. His book is particularly worth mentioning

• The quantum theory. Their origin and development. Berlin 1921. - English edition: The Quantum Theory. London 1922. - 2nd Ed. 1924. 3rd Ed. 1930. - American edition: New York 1922. - 2nd. Ed. 1930. - Spanish edition: La teoría de los cuantos. Madrid 1922

A full list of publications can be found in the biography of Valentin Wehefritz.

Biographical literature

• Valentin Wehefritz: University in Exile 5: Blown traces. Prof. Dr. phil. Fritz Reiche. University Library, Dortmund 2002, ISBN 3-921823-28-5