Hendrik Casimir

Hendrik Casimir

Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir (born July 15, 1909 in The Hague ; † May 4, 2000 in Heeze ) was a Dutch physicist .

Casimir obtained his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1931 , where he was a student of Paul Ehrenfest . After working with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen (where he was 18 months) and in 1932/33 as assistant to Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich (where Linus Pauling was a colleague), he returned to Leiden in 1933 after the death of his wife. There he developed with Cornelis Jacobus Gorterthe two-liquid model of superconductors (with a normally conducting and superconducting "liquid" as a phenomenological model of the charge carriers). From 1936 he was senior assistant and curator at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory and from 1939 to 1942 he was an associate professor in Leiden. During the German occupation in World War II, which put a stop to university life, he went to the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven in 1942 , where he worked until the end of his career. He was co-director of the laboratory from 1946 to 1972 and was instrumental in directing research at the laboratory. 1956 to 1972 he was on the board of Philips as responsible for research.

He is best known for the Casimir effect , which he predicted in 1948 and which was proven experimentally in 1958 by Marcus Sparnaay at the Philips laboratory. The Casimir operator is also named after him. He also did basic research on antennas (with Chris Boukamp).

Casimir coined the term science-technology spiral. This is followed by the technology of basic research every ten years and, in turn, drives basic research with new, generally accessible technologies.

Casimir was given many honors during his life. So z. B. was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1970) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1957) as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1970), the American Philosophical Society (1971), the National Academy of Engineering (1976) and of the Académie des Sciences (1981). He received the George E. Pake Prize of the American Physical Society and in 1982 the Order Pour le Mérite for Science and the Arts . In his honor, a symposium was held in the Philips research laboratory in 1989 on his 80th birthday.

Furthermore, he was the President of the European Physical Society (EPS) from 1972 to 1975 , in whose establishment he was involved in 1968.

In 1932 he married Josina Jonker, with whom he had a son and four daughters.

literature

• Hendrik BG Casimir: Rotation of a rigid body in quantum mechanics. Wolter, Groningen 1931
• Hendrik BG Casimir: Magnetism and very low temperatures. Dover Publ., New York 1961
• Hendrik BG Casimir: On the interaction between atomic nuclei and electrons. Freeman, San Francisco 1963
• Hendrik BG Casimir: Physics in the making - essays on developments in 20th century physics. North-Holland, Amsterdam 1989, ISBN 0-444-88121-2
• Hendrik BG Casimir: Haphazard Reality - Half a Century of Science. Harper & Row, New York 1983, ISBN 0-06-337031-X .
• Helmut Rechenberg : Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir (1909-2000) - The Physicist in Research, Industry and Society. European Journal of Physics, 22, pp. 441-446, 2001 abstract

Web links

Commons : Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Obituary, New York Times, October 13, 2000
• The Casimir Force ( Memento from April 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
• Entry on Casimir, Hendrik Brugt Gerhard (1909–2000) in the archive of the Royal Society , London
• Entry about Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir in the database of the Wilhelm Exner Medal Foundation .