Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg

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Heinrich August Adolf Julius Freiherr Rausch von Traubenberg (born March 17, 1880 in the Jörden manor ; † September 19, 1944 in Hirschberg am See ) was an experimental physicist specializing in canal rays, the Stark effect and nuclear reactions.

Life

Coat of arms of those Rausch von Traubenberg

Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg was born the son of the manor owner Emanuel Baron Rausch von Traubenberg (1843–1909) and his wife Julie Hedwig von Helffreich (1855–1920).

He attended grammar schools in Kassel and Stuttgart and graduated from high school in 1899. He then studied physics, mathematics and chemistry in Leipzig, Freiburg and Würzburg. When Willy Vienna in Würzburg, he was in 1905 with the theme "Across the Hall effect of bismuth doctorate at high temperatures." He then worked as an industrial physicist in high frequency technology with Georg von Arco at Telefunken in Berlin.

In April 1910 he became assistant for air electricity to Emil Wiechert at the geophysical institute of the University of Göttingen . He soon made friends with the theoretical physicist Max Born and had long philosophical discussions with him. Since April 1912 he supervised the physics internship as an assistant to Eduard Riecke and completed his habilitation with a thesis on spark discharges. During the First World War he represented Robert Wichard Pohl , who was called to Göttingen and who was deployed as a soldier.

In June 1916 he founded the pacifist association of like-minded people with Count Arco and others. After he was denounced in 1917 because of critical remarks about the course of the war, the pacifist had to take up short-term military service in 1918. Immediately after the war he joined the New Fatherland Federation and was a member of the working committee.

In December 1918 he was appointed adjunct professor in Göttingen. In September 1920 he married the widow of Otto Riess (died 1914), Marie Hilde Riess b. Rosenfeld (1889–1964), daughter of Hugo Rosenfeld and Helene geb. Gmeyner; they had the daughters Dorothee (* 1921) and Helene (* 1924).

In September 1922 he accepted an appointment at the German University in Prague and in 1931, succeeded Hans Geiger, and moved to an experimental physics chair at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. There he met the theoretical physicist Theodor Kaluza , with whom he had extensive discussions.

On February 9, 1937, at the age of 56, he was given early retirement because his wife was of Jewish descent. After the family moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg , he set up a private laboratory there so that he could continue to work experimentally. When the family's living situation became more and more threatening, it was possible in 1939 to have at least the two underage daughters taken in with the befriended, meanwhile emigrated family Max and Hedwig Born in Edinburgh . The subsequent correspondence between parents and daughters was arranged by the physicist Lise Meitner , who emigrated to Sweden . When his apartment was completely destroyed in a bombing of Berlin in February 1944, he and his wife were able to move to the castle in Hirschberg am See in Bohemia to live with their friend, Count Karl Ernst Waldstein-Wartenberg (1897–1985). But on September 19, 1944, his wife was picked up by the Gestapo and taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp . This shook him so badly that he died of a heart attack that same day. With the help of Otto Hahn , his wife received relief from prison because Hahn had convinced the authorities that the knowledgeable widow would have to process her husband's legacy, which is important for physics. She survived the concentration camp and died in England in 1964, 20 years after her husband.

Working as a physicist

From 1912 onwards, Rausch von Traubenberg investigated the behavior of discharge sparks in Göttingen. He then observed the penetration and passage of canal rays in solid bodies. In particular, he followed the upheaval in modern physics caused by quantum mechanics , as he recorded in a publication in 1913. Around 1917 he independently built a particularly effective ion tube for Peter Debye and Paul Scherrer . These investigated the structure of crystal powders with X-rays for the first time . The method they newly developed was later called the Debye-Scherrer method .

As with canal rays, he determined the range and braking of alpha radiation in liquids and solids in the following years . In Prague he continued this work from 1922 and observed the effect of magnetic fields on this radiation. With the investigation of the Stark effect of hydrogen canal rays, he concentrated on particularly high constant and also variable electrical field strengths. In close cooperation with Professor Erwin Schrödinger , he was able to experimentally confirm his quantum mechanical approaches. He continued his successful work on the Stark effect from 1931 after moving to Kiel together with his student Rudolf Gebauer (1904–1990). After gaining thorough experimental experience with protons , he was able to use them to smash lithium atomic nuclei with the lowest possible impact energy and to detect the gamma radiation emitted for the first time. Just when he had started to carry out backscattering experiments with neutrons and was able to create rooms with a higher neutron density, he was dismissed from the University of Kiel in 1937. Then he moved to Berlin with his wife. But there no more complex experiments could be carried out in his private laboratory.

After his sudden death in 1944, the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld wrote in an obituary after the end of the war: "Von Traubenberg was an original researcher who did not shrink from any experimental difficulty, who approached nature with his own methods and always had questions of principle in mind".

Works

  • Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg: The current state of our basic physical views and their position on epistemology , in advanced training courses of the Baltic Literary Society, Riga, 1913.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Magnus von Stackelberg (edit.): Genealogical manual of the Baltic knighthoods part 2, 3: Estland , Görlitz 1930, p. 188.
  2. ^ GJ Hyland: Herbert Fröhlich. A Physicist ahead of his time , 2015, p. 121.
  3. ↑ Marie Hilde Rosenfeld family record sheet
personal data
SURNAME Rausch von Traubenberg, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rausch von Traubenberg, Heinrich August Adolf Julius Freiherr (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Experimental physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Manor Jörden
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1944
Place of death Hirschberg am See