Heinrich Friedrich Weber

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Heinrich Friedrich Weber (born November 7, 1843 in Magdala , † May 24, 1912 in Zurich ) was a Swiss physicist .

Heinrich Friedrich Weber

Life

From around 1861 Heinrich Friedrich Weber attended the University of Jena , where he quickly realized that he lacked mathematical talent and then devoted himself to physics. Ernst Abbe , with whom he wrote his dissertation on light diffraction in 1865, had the greatest influence on him . In the second half of the 1860s, Weber was a private lecturer in Pforzheim . Pforzheim was close to Heidelberg University , where he came into contact with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz , and to the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe, where Weber became assistant to Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann in 1870 . When Helmholtz was appointed to the University of Berlin in 1871, he took Weber with him as his first assistant. Weber helped set up the laboratories there for the next three years.

In the years 1872 and 1874 he published two papers in the Annalen der Physik on the specific heat of carbon , boron and silicon at different temperatures. It turned out to be lower at low temperatures than predicted by the Dulong-Petit law .

Heinrich Friedrich Weber became professor for technical and mathematical physics and head of the physical and electrotechnical laboratories at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich . With young Albert Einstein his collar burst because he couldn't be told.

Weber's data on the specific heat of diamond were later used by Albert Einstein when he first applied the quantum hypothesis to solids. From his experimental results on light emission from solid bodies, he recognized the connection that, ten years later, caused a sensation as Wien's displacement law.

Weber married Anna Hochstetter in 1875. From this connection there were three daughters and five sons, the latter all embarked on an academic career: Oskar: chemist; Friedrich: geologist; Ernst: civil engineer; Helmut and Richard: Medic.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Weber, HF, "New Problems of the Diffraction Theory of Light", dissertation, Jena, 1865
  2. ^ Weber, HF, "The specific heat of the elements carbon, boron and silicon", Pogg. Ann., 154, 1874
  3. ^ Weber, HF, "The development of light emission from glowing solid bodies", Sitz. Berl. Akad. 28, 1887; Wied. Ann. 32, 1887