Henry Margenau
Henry Margenau (born April 30, 1901 in Bielefeld , † February 8, 1997 in Hamden (Connecticut) ) was a German-American physicist and philosopher of science.
Life
Margenau trained as a primary school teacher in Germany and came to the USA in 1922, where he lived with a distant relative in Nebraska and worked as a farm helper. He studied mainly Latin at Midland Lutheran College in Nebraska , with a bachelor's degree in just one year in 1924. He then continued his studies at the University of Nebraska with a master's degree in physics in 1926 (with a master's thesis on Zeeman Effect ) and at Yale University , where he received his PhD in 1929. He then went to Europe as a Sterling Fellow, where he studied the then new quantum mechanics, and taught at Yale from 1931 as an assistant professor and from 1939 as an associate professor.
During World War II he worked on microwaves and radar.
In 1945 he was given a full professorship at Yale and in 1950 until his retirement in 1969 he was Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy at Yale University . In 1939 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study , where he worked with John Archibald Wheeler and Eugene Wigner . In 1947 he was visiting professor at the University of California and in 1953 and 1971 in Heidelberg. In 1960 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in Tokyo.
Margenau dealt with nuclear physics, intramolecular forces, spectroscopy, electronics, microwaves (among other things, he developed a radar antenna that could receive and transmit simultaneously) and wrote about the relationship between science and religion and society, free will, consciousness (and parapsychology ) and philosophy of physics. His turn to philosophy happened in the early 1940s under the influence of Ernst Cassirer at Yale. Both gave joint lectures on Kant and worked on a new edition of Cassirer's Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (published by Margenau in 1956).
He received multiple honorary doctorates, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1952) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he was a Guggenheim Fellow . He was the editor of Foundations of Physics . He has been a consultant to the US National Bureau of Standards , the Rand Corporation , General Electric , Lockheed , the United States Atomic Energy Commission , the MIT Radiation Laboratory , the US Air Force and the Argonne National Laboratory , among others . He was president of the Philosophy of Science Association and a member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences in Brussels. In 1969 he received the Devane Medal and in 1955 the Century Award from Michigan State University.
He had been married to Liesel Noe since 1932 and had two sons and a daughter. Margenau had been a US citizen since 1930.
Fonts
- with George Murphy (editor): The mathematics of physics and chemistry, 2 volumes, Van Nostrand 1943, 1956 (1st edition still with Margenau and Murphy as sole authors in one volume, in the 2nd edition additional chapters by different authors)
- The Scientist, Time Life Books 1964
- The nature of physical reality, McGraw Hill 1950, Oxbow Press 1977 (reprint)
- Editor: Integrative principles of modern thought, Gordon and Breach 1972
- Ethics of Science 1964, Krieger 1979
- Scientific Indeterminism and Human Freedom, 1968
- Physics - principles and applications, McGraw Hill 1949, 1953
- with Robert Bruce Lindsay: Foundations of Physics, Wiley 1936
- Editor with N. Kestner: Cosmos, Bios, Theos Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo sapiens, Open Court Publishing Company 1992
- The Miracle of Existence. Ox Bow Press 1984
- Theory of intermolecular forces, Oxford, Pergamon Press 1969, 1971
- with L. LeShan: Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky: Physical Reality and Beyond. Macmillan 1982
- Physics and Philosophy: Selected Essays, Reidel 1978
- Open Vistas: Philosophical Perspectives on Modern Science, Yale University Press 1961
- Thomas and the Physics of 1958: A Confrontation. Marquette University Press 1958
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Membership Book IAS 1980
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Margenau, Henry |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-American physicist and philosopher of science |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 30, 1901 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bielefeld |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 1997 |
| Place of death | Hamden (Connecticut) |