Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn

Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn (born March 10, 1904 in Breslau ; † August 26, 1994 ) was a German-British physicist.

Life and activity

Kuhn was a son of the lawyer Wilhelm Kuhn and his wife Martha. His older brother was the philosopher Helmut Kuhn . One of his uncle was the singer and conductor George Henschel , who worked in the USA and Great Britain and was friends with Brahms.

After attending school, Kuhn studied chemistry in Greifswald from 1922 (chemistry exam 1924) and physics in Göttingen from 1924. At the end of 1926 he received his doctorate with a thesis supervised by James Franck , then professor for experimental physics. He then became Kuhn's assistant and, after his habilitation in 1931, taught as a private lecturer in Göttingen from 1931 to 1933.

After the National Socialists came to power , Kuhn, who was considered a Jew according to the National Socialist definition, requested his dismissal from civil service, a step in which he followed his mentor Franck, who had behaved in the same way. This took place in July 1933. In the same year he emigrated to Great Britain, where he found a position at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University , which was financed by a scholarship he received from Imperial Chemical Industries through the mediation of Frederick Lindemann . There he worked with Derek Jackson on, among other things, hyperfine structure, profiles of spectral lines and their pressure broadening. In 1939 he became a British citizen.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Kuhn as an enemy of the state: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

During the Second World War, Kuhn, who obtained an English master’s degree in 1941, worked in the field of uranium enrichment. After the war he returned to Oxford, where, after twelve years in the country, he finally got a regular teaching position as a lecturer and university demonstrator. In 1955 he was raised to the rank of reader by the university . From 1950 to 1954 he was a fellow at Balliol College. As before, he mainly dealt with atomic spectroscopy. Even after his retirement in 1971 he continued to work in the Faculty of Astrophysics.

In 1954, Kuhn became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1967 he received the Holweck Prize .

family

Kuhn was married to Bertha Marie Nohl, a daughter of Herman Nohl , with whom he had two sons (Anselm Thomas, Nicholas John).

Fonts

• Atomic Spectra , Academic Publishing Company 1934.
• Atomic spectra, Academic Press 1962.

literature

• Brebis Bleaney: "Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn", in: Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society , Volume 42, 1996, pp. 221-232.
• Christiane Goldenstedt: "You haunted me at night." - The Kuhn family in exile , 2013.