Fritz Rohrlich

Fritz Rohrlich (born May 12, 1921 in Vienna ; † November 14, 2018 in DeWitt , Onondaga County , New York ) was an American theoretical physicist who dealt with classical electrodynamics and quantum electrodynamics .

Live and act

Rohrlich was the son of a lawyer and left the country as a Jew after Austria's “Anschluss” in 1938 (he even had to do forced labor for a short time) to study electrical engineering and chemical engineering at the Technion in Haifa from 1939 - his parents came in 1942 in Sobibor around. While he was working as a technician for the British in Jerusalem, he studied physics with Giulio Racah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , his real goal of study. In 1946 he continued his studies at Harvard University , where he made his master's degree in 1947 and received his doctorate in 1948 with Julian Schwinger .
He was then assistant to Norman Foster Ramsey at Harvard and in 1948 at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1949 he conducted research with Hans Bethe at Cornell University , where he also met Richard Feynman and aroused his interest in the divergence problems of classical electrodynamics, for which he later became a leading expert. At the same time he made important contributions to the establishment of early quantum electrodynamics (he showed the equivalence of the various formulations for particles of spin 0, after Freeman Dyson had shown this for spin ½).

In 1951 he became an assistant professor at Princeton University , where he gave lectures on quantum electrodynamics, from which his textbook with Josef-Maria Jauch later emerged, a standard work at the time. From 1953 he was a colleague of Jauch at the University of Iowa before he became a professor at Syracuse University in 1963 . At the beginning of the 1960s he also investigated (with T. Fulton and Louis Witten ) the problem of radiation from the free falling charged particle in general relativity and the question of whether this violated the equivalence principle . In the 1980s he became increasingly concerned with the philosophy of science. In 1991 he retired .

In 1957 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1974 he became an honorary professor at the University of Graz and received a Fulbright Award.

Works (selection)

Essays

• Classical radiation from a uniformly accelerating charge . In: Annals of Physics , Vol. 9 (1960), pp. 499-517 (with Thomas Fulton ).
• An elementary derivation of E = mc² . In: American Journal of Physics , Volume 58, Issue 4 (1990), p. 348.

Books.

• Classical charged particles . 3rd ed., World Scientific Press, Hackensack, NJ 2007, ISBN 978-981-270-004-9 (update of the New York edition, 1955).
• From paradox to reality. Our basic concepts of the physical world . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997, ISBN 0-521-30749-X .
• The theory of photons and electrons. The relativistic quantum field theory of charged particles with spin one-half . 2nd ed., Springer, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-540-07295-0 (reprint of the London 1955 edition; together with Josef-Maria Jauch ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz Rohrlich Obituary . In: Syracuse Post-Standard , November 15, 2018. 
2. ↑ Friedrich Stadler: Expelled reason. Emigration and exile of Austrian science . LIT-Verlag, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7372-2

Web links

• Max Jammer zu Rohrlich, Foundations of Physics 1994 (PDF file; 438 kB)