Hans Euler

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Hans Euler, 1937

Hans Heinrich Euler (born October 6, 1909 in Meran ; † 1941 ) was a German physicist.

Life

He received his doctorate in 1935 in Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg on the subject of the scattering of light to light according to Dirac's theory . The second reviewer was Friedrich Hund . He then succeeded Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker as Heisenberg's assistant. Hans Euler was close to the communists and was shielded by Heisenberg, who worked closely with him in the 1930s, in his Leipzig institute. Ivan Supek described the mood during his stay in Leipzig very well, starting with the Reichspogromnacht 1938: There was shouting in public, there was fire and hatred of Jews in contrast to the shielded depression in the Physikalisches Institut (apart from Erich Bagge not a single Nazi), where Supek up to Worked in 1941 and had good contact with Euler, Heisenberg and Hund. The Hitler-Stalin Pact and previous experience in a National Socialist training camp in 1938, which Euler had to undergo if he wanted to do his habilitation, hit him hard. In addition, his Jewish fiancée had to flee to Switzerland.

After his close friend, the Finn Bernt Olof Grönblom, also a talented student of Heisenberg, volunteered on the Finnish side in the Soviet-Finnish war (he fell at the end of 1941), reported Euler, who had previously not been drafted because of poor health, volunteered for the Air Force in World War II and was used as a meteorologist in reconnaissance flights over England, Crete and Egypt in 1940/41. Heisenberg's efforts to place him in the uranium project were rejected. In June 1941 he was reported missing after a reconnaissance flight over the Sea of ​​Azov near the Crimea . On June 24, 1941, the He 111 of Wekusta 76 (serial number 3205, identification 5Z + FA) ditched an engine failure in the Sea of ​​Azov 55 km south of Melitopol and the entire crew was captured by fishermen the next day. Despite intensive efforts by Heisenberg, who also called on the English physicist PAM Blackett for this purpose (who had ties to the Russians), no more details about Euler's further fate were found out. Heisenberg reports on conversations with Euler in The Part and the Whole .

Euler was the first physicist who was able to show that Paul Dirac's introduction of the positron opens up the possibility of photons scattering with one another through electron-positron pair generation, and in his dissertation he calculated the cross-section for this process. Together with Heisenberg, Euler modified the Lagrangian of the electromagnetic field in quantum electrodynamics by nonlinear terms to take into account pair generation from the vacuum .

Fonts

  • About the scattering of light by light according to Dirac's theory. In: Annals of Physics. Volume 418, 1936, pp. 398-448.
  • with Bernhard Kockel : About the scattering of light on light according to Dirac's theory. In: Natural Sciences. Volume 23, 1935, p. 246
  • with Werner Heisenberg: Theoretical viewpoints for the interpretation of cosmic rays , results of the exact natural sciences, Volume 17, 1938, pp. 1-69
  • with Werner Heisenberg: Conclusions from Dirac's theory of the positron , Zeitschrift für Physik, Volume 98, 1936, p. 714

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ivan Supek: Leipzig in the time of Heisenberg and Hund . Hundred years of Friedrich Hund. News from the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1996, pp. 33 to 52. (Excerpts from Discovery of Lost Time , Zagreb 1987.) - I. Supek was President of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1991 to 1997 .
  2. ^ Heinrich Arnold: On an autobiographical letter from Robert Döpel to Fritz Straßmann. ZIP file, 2012 p. 19ff .: Section " Bagge, Euler and Supek. "
  3. ^ Elisabeth Heisenberg: The Political Life of an Unpolitical Man , Piper 1980, p. 76
  4. ↑ According to Elisabeth Heisenberg, the students Grönblom, Euler and the Norwegian Harald Wergeland formed a close trio of friends in Leipzig
  5. ^ David Cassidy: Uncertainty , Freeman, 1992, pp. 431f
  6. ↑ dtv edition, 1988, Chapter 14, pp. 207f.

Web links

Wikisource: Hans Heinrich Euler  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Euler, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Euler, Hans Heinrich (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Meran
DATE OF DEATH 1941