Herbert Jehle

Herbert Jehle (born March 5, 1907 in Stuttgart ; † January 14, 1983 near Koblenz ) was a German-American physicist.

Jehle studied at the Technical University of Stuttgart with a degree in engineering in 1930 and was awarded a doctorate in circular weaving at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg. Ing. PhD. This was followed by a study visit to Cambridge University in 1933/34, where he dealt with theoretical physics. In 1935/36 he worked for the yearbook progress in mathematics . He left Germany as a staunch pacifist (he was connected to the Quakers) and an opponent of the racial politics of the Nazis. In 1937/38 he was research assistant at University College in Southampton and from 1938 to 1940 at the Free University of Brussels. After internment at Camp de Gurs in the Pyrenees, he managed to travel to the USA, where he was at Harvard University from 1942 to 1946, at the Franklin Institute in 1946/47, at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947/48 , and at the 1947-1949 University of Pennsylvania and from 1949 to 1959 at the University of Nebraska . From 1959 he was a professor at George Washington University . In 1972 he retired. He died on the train near Koblenz.

He dealt with various questions in theoretical physics, including wave mechanics, spinor field equations, astrophysics, cosmology, biophysics (in 1949 he published on self-duplication of biological macromolecules), statistical mechanics.

As Richard Feynman describes in his Nobel Lecture, it was Herbert Jehle who gave him the decisive reference to the work of Paul Dirac in Princeton (at a party) , which then led to Feynman's development of the path integrals .

After his retirement he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (1973/74), at the universities of Maryland, Amsterdam, Uppsala and from 1977 in Munich.

In 1950 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

literature

• Obituary by W. Drechsler, Helmut Rechenberg , Physikalische Blätter, Volume 39, 1983, p. 71