Hardwin Jungclaussen

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Hardwin Jungclaussen (2018)

HardWin Jungclaussen (* 12. November 1923 in Hamburg , † 28. September 2019 ) was a German physicist and engineer scientist with the fields of atomic physics and information science . He was a close relative of the world-famous physicists Heinrich Hertz and Gustav Hertz .

Life and education

Hardwin Jungclaussen was born as the son of pastor Hermann Jungclaussen and his wife Susanne Jungclaussen, nee. Hertz, sister of the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Gustav Hertz , was born in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel . For professional reasons, the family moved to Münster in Westphalia in 1927 , where he attended the Protestant Martin Luther School there from the age of six. In 1937 the family moved to Kiel , where he opted for a humanistic grammar school, although he wanted to study physics. He first learned Latin, ancient Greek, French and some English at the Kiel School of Academics, which was founded in 1320 . A close school friend in those years was Werner Creutzfeldt and his father Hans-Gerhard Creutzfeldt , professor and chief physician of the psychiatric clinic in Kiel and one of the discoverers of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease , gave him great support. This school friend Werner was a grandson of Werner Sombart , a leading economist in Germany before the Second World War. His son Nicolaus Sombart , a half-brother of Werner Creutzfeldt's mother, has become known as a cultural sociologist and writer .

Another school friend was Ludwig von Friedeburg , son of Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg , who signed the deeds of surrender on May 7, 1945 and committed suicide a few days later. Ludwig von Friedeburg has in the Frankfurt School in Theodor W. Adorno in the field sociology habilitation , after which he became Minister of Education (SPD) in Hesse , trying against this broad resistance to reform the school system fundamentally what not. He was later a professor and for many years director of the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main .

When schools in Kiel were evacuated due to the war in 1942 (Kinderlandverschickung), Jungclaussen came to Templin in the Uckermark for half a year , where he attended the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium with increased mathematics lessons. When he returned to Kiel, he also received private tuition in mathematics and chemistry, in German and English, and passed his Abitur at his old school in early 1942 . From around the age of 15 he became aware that not everything that was said was correct, and so he developed a critical attitude towards established scientific and political systems that has accompanied him throughout his life and not infrequently led to difficulties.

Two months after graduating from high school, he was drafted into the armed forces. After his training he came to the Eastern Front in the spring of 1943, where he was promoted to lieutenant and after Germany's surrender in Latvia was taken prisoner by the Soviets. In the prison camp in Domodedowo , a suburb of Moscow , he did simple work, for example on the saw gate, but was able to be culturally active and further his education in philosophy, politics and physics.

In the spring of 1946 the prisoners of war there were allowed to write home for the first time. He wrote to his mother because his father, an officer in the First and Second World Wars , died in Estonia in 1942 and is buried in the Tallinn War Cemetery. This letter was also able to inform his uncle Gustav Hertz about his stay, and a year later Jungclaussen was picked up by a Soviet major in the prison camp and taken to his uncle in Agudsera south of Sukhumi on the Black Sea . Gustav Hertz, who was now in the service of the Soviet Union as a German specialist, for whom his own institute (subject: isotope separation for the Soviet atomic bomb project ) and a private villa was built, made this possible. Hardwin Jungclaussen lived with his uncle and worked for six years as a laboratory assistant in his uncle's institute. He was initially assigned to the physicist Heinz Barwich , who later won the Stalin Prize and later became professor and founding director of the nuclear research center in Rossendorf near Dresden . So he was able to move from a prisoner-of-war camp near Moscow to a "paradise" on the Black Sea.

In 1953 he began a distance learning course in physics at the University of Rostov-on-Don , which was later converted into a direct course. Here he also got to know the German chemistry student Cornelius Weiss , who was elected rector of the University of Leipzig after German reunification , then worked as a member of the Saxon state parliament in the SPD parliamentary group and finally as its senior president. Jungclaussen, however, like most German specialists, had to return to Germany in 1955, for the first time in around a dozen years, and he familiarized himself with both parts of his homeland. In turn, it was his uncle who succeeded in having him continue studying at Moscow State University (MGU, known as Lomonosov University , the largest university institution in the country). A highlight for Jungclaussen was the lectures given by the three later Nobel Prize winners Lew Landau (1962), Igor Tamm (1958) and Ilja Frank (1958). His academic teacher was Josef Salomonowitsch Schapiro . In the last year of his studies Jungclaussen completed an internship in Dresden with the microelectronics pioneer Werner Hartmann , in whose laboratory he had recently worked in Agudseri . Then he went back to Moscow to Schapiro , who gave him the topic for his diploma thesis: "Setting up an apparatus for measuring the circular polarization of gamma quanta and carrying out measurements". These should provide the experimental confirmation of the failure to maintain parity symmetry. With this work he obtained the academic degree as a graduate physicist .

During his student years in Moscow, a close friendship developed with his German fellow physics student Ulrich Hofmann , which lasted his whole life.

Worked at the Academy of Sciences

In the fall of 1956, Hardwin Jungclaussen became a research assistant with Josef Schintlmeister , head of the "Cyclotron" department at the Central Institute for Nuclear Research of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (DAW) in Rossendorf near Dresden . He had already got to know and appreciate Schintlmeister while mountain climbing in the Central Caucasus. The subject of Jungclaussen's research was the investigation of the suitability of semiconductor diodes as particle detectors for nuclear spectroscopy. Schintlmeister gave him the task of finally and reliably investigating the radioactive decay of cesium 137, an isotope of the element cesium , which he succeeded in doing. In 1962 he received his doctorate under Schintlmeister as a doctoral engineer (Dr.-Ing.) With the dissertation “Measurements for the decay scheme of cesium 137 ( 137 Cs)”. Nikolaus Lehmann , the well-known developer of the D4a small computer, the predecessor of a personal computer (PC), took the doctoral examination in the minor computer technology .

Worked at the United Institute for Nuclear Research Dubna near Moscow

Immediately after receiving his doctorate, he spent six years in the nuclear research center Dubna in the autumn of 1962 to the autumn of 1968 , where he worked in the laboratory for nuclear reactions under the direction of Georgi Nikolaevich Fljorow . There he took part in experiments in the search for transurans . He managed to explain a number of experimental results theoretically, in particular an experiment based on the shell theory for deformed nuclei, which led to an invitation to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen .

Worked at the Technical University of Dresden

After his return from Dubna , he completed his habilitation with the thesis "Shape anisotropy and fission isomers of heavy atomic nuclei" as a Dr.-Ing. habil., which was based on his work carried out and published in Dubna. Here, too, he was very much supported by Josef Schintlmeister .

Since his efforts to obtain a professorship at the Physics Section of the TU Dresden were unsuccessful for political reasons, he initially moved to the Central Institute for Cybernetics and Information Processes (Director: Horst Völz ) at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (DAW) at the beginning of 1969 Berlin-Adlershof , where he became head of the newly created information theory working group . Since his youth he had been concerned with the questions: How do people think? What happens in my brain when I think?

At the end of 1969, however, he was appointed to the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) as a university lecturer for "Cybernetic Systems of Information Processing" (equivalent to C3 professor ). He later described the transition to university as the most serious wrong decision of his life . His efforts to get an appointment as a full professor were repeatedly unsuccessful for political reasons. In view of the increasing differences in professional and political respects, the feeling of being at the mercy and the fear of attacks from outside, he suffered a slight psychological breakdown in 1972, which he survived happily with the help of his family doctor, his family and in the course of a Pamir expedition.

Particularly noteworthy is his work on two projects:

  • The teaching and file system LEDA, with which one can infer a student's abilities from the behavior of a student, and
  • the networking of operators, which allowed him to recursion from complex to simpler operators and to prove the Church-Turing thesis .

In 1980 he decided to officially refrain from any promotion in order to devote himself to his scientific work.

In 1994 he began developing his neural epistemology , which was reflected in several books. At an advanced age, he drove regularly from 1994 to 1998 to the Vienna University of Technology to lead a group of students there at Professor Peter Fleissner's institute who implemented his epistemology. His scientific and journalistic activities were still to be found in 2018, true to his motto: "If I really understand something, then I am happy".

The Jungclaussen couple on the occasion of their 90th birthday, Dresden 2013

Memberships (selection)

family

Hardwin Jungclaussen's ancestors with the surname Hertz were originally of Jewish origin, but converted as Protestant Christians. His great-grandfathers were the Hamburg Senator Gustav Ferdinand Hertz and the Hamburg District Court President Christian Arning , his grandfather the Hamburg lawyer Gustav Theodor Hertz. His great-uncle was Heinrich Hertz , the discoverer of electromagnetic waves, after whom the physical unit hertz (Hz) for frequency was named, and his uncle was Gustav Hertz , whose electron impact tests ( Franck-Hertz tests ) carried out together with James Franck were proved to be an essential pillar of atomic and quantum theory and was therefore honored with the joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925 .

Hardwin Jungclaussen and his future wife Galina, Moscow 1955

Since 1956 Hardwin Jungclaussen was married to the mathematician and Germanist Galina Kusitschkina; the civil wedding took place in Moscow. They have three daughters, Lyudmilla (adopted by Hardwin Jungclaussen), Ellen and Rita.

Publications

Jungclaussen's research has resulted in around 100 scientific publications , including more than 35 book publications.

  • Measurements on the decay scheme of cesium 137 ( 137 Cs). Dissertation, TU Dresden 1962.
  • Shape anisotropy and fission isomers of heavy atomic nuclei. Habilitation thesis, TU Dresden 1968.
  • The LEDA experiment. In: Birgit Demuth (Hrsg.): Computer science in the GDR - basics and applications. Pp. 176–184, Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn 2008.
  • Causal computer science. Introduction to the teaching of active linguistic modeling by humans and computers. With a foreword by Erwin Stoschek. Deutscher Universitätsverlag, Wiesbaden 2001, ISBN 978-3-8244-2143-5 .
  • Conversations with third parties. Part I: How do we know the world? Dispute about a neural epistemology. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2009, 2nd edition 2016, ISBN 978-3-86464-111-4 .
  • Conversations with third parties. Part II: How do we act? Dispute about human behavior and its neural basis. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2011, 2nd edition 2016, ISBN 978-3-86464-112-1 .
  • Conversations with third parties. Part III: How do we live together? Dispute about steps into the future. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2013, 2nd edition 2016, ISBN 978-3-86464-113-8 .
  • Free in three dictatorships - How I experienced my life and how I found my happiness. Autobiography. trafo publishing group Dr. Wolfgang Weist, trafo Literaturverlag, Autobiographies Volume 48 series, Berlin 2015, 213 pages, ISBN 978-3-86465-050-5 .
  • Answers to the question: "Who are we?" An essay. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86464-119-0 .
  • The rise of the west. An essay. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86464-143-5 .
  • Whom does God help? Paths to Inner Peace. An essay. trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86464-117-6 .

Including translations from Russian :

  • Theoretical physics textbook. First volume: Mechanics of the five-volume work by Lew Landau and Jewgeni Lifschitz . Verlag Europa-Lehrmittel Nourney, Vollmer; Haan-Gruiten 1962, 5th edition 1967.

literature

  • Werner Scheler : From the German Academy of Sciences to Berlin to the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. Outline of the genesis and transformation of the academy. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 978-3-320-01991-4 .

Web links

Commons : Hardwin Jungclaussen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary notice , Sächsische Zeitung of November 9, 2019.
  2. ↑ Hardwin Jungclaussen: Свободен при трёх диктатурах (Free in three dictatorships). - Как я прожил свою жизнь и как я нашёл своё счастье (How I experienced my life and how I found my happiness). Autobiography. trafo Literaturverlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86465-108-3 .
  3. ↑ Hardwin Jungclaussen: Free in three dictatorships - How I experienced my life and how I found my happiness. Autobiography. trafo publishing group Dr. Wolfgang Weist, trafo Literaturverlag, Autobiographies Volume 48, Berlin 2015, p. 128, ISBN 978-3-86465-050-5 .
  4. ↑ Hardwin Jungclaussen: Free in three dictatorships - How I experienced my life and how I found my happiness. Autobiography. trafo publishing group Dr. Wolfgang Weist, trafo Literaturverlag, Autobiographies Volume 48 series, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86465-050-5 , pp. 82–91.
personal data
SURNAME Jungclaussen, Hardwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist in the fields of atomic physics and information science
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 2019