Jagdish Mehra

Jagdish Mehra (born April 8, 1931 in Merath north of New Delhi , † September 14, 2008 in Sugar Land near Houston , Texas ) was an Indian-American historian of science.

life and work

Mehra studied at the University of Allahabad (diploma in physics) and was then from 1952 to 1955 at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen . In 1957 he went to the USA, where he again obtained his master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1963 he received his doctorate from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland ( The theory of London-van der Waals forces and certain features of the equation of state of gases ). Afterwards he was in the USA among other things 1964/65 Assistant Professor of Physics at Purdue University and from 1965 to 1967 at the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth and from 1967 as Program Director of the Science Research Association of IBM in Chicago (where he is also dealing with the history of physics). From 1969 to 1973 he was Special Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin (where the Belgian physicist Ilja Prigogine and the Indian physicist George Sudarshan were at the time). In 1973 he went to Geneva University as a professor and was professor at the Solvay Institute in Brussels from 1973 to 1988 . From the 1980s he spent a lot of time in the United States, teaching at Rice University and the University of Houston as visiting professor. He was UNESCO Sir Julian Huxley Distinguished Professor for the History of Science in Paris and from 1989 to 1991 at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste . From 1993 to 1996 he was Citadel Distinguished Professor of Physics in Charleston (South Carolina) . He was also visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine . Since 1996 he has been a professor at the University of Houston .

He began to be interested in the history of physics at an early age and conducted extensive oral history interviews with, among others, Paul Dirac , Richard Feynman (shortly before his death), Werner Heisenberg , Eugene Wigner and others. In September 1972 he organized a symposium on Dirac's 70th birthday in Trieste (from which the anthology "The physicists concept of nature" emerged), in which many pioneers of quantum theory still took part. He organized social events in Texas, Brussels and Geneva, where personalities from the humanities and natural sciences met and also interviewed writers and philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre , TS Eliot , Aldous Huxley , Carl Gustav Jung , all collected in his estate, the located at the University of Houston.

He wrote the biographies of Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger (with his close collaborator Milton) and edited the collected works of Wigner with Arthur Wightman (8 volumes, 1990-2000). With Helmut Rechenberg he wrote a six-volume standard work on the history of quantum theory. He also wrote about Albert Einstein, whose first scientific publication he "discovered" in 1895.

Fonts

• with Helmut Rechenberg: The historical development of quantum theory . 6 volumes, Springer, 1982–2002
• The beat of a different drum - the life and science of Richard Feynman . Oxford University Press, 1994
• with Kimball Milton : Climbing the mountain - the scientific biography of Julian Schwinger . 2000
• Einstein, Hilbert and the theory of gravitation - historical origins of general relativity . Dordrecht 1974
• The golden age of theoretical physics - selected essays . 2000
• Editor The physicists conception of nature . Reidel Publ., Dordrecht 1973
• Einstein, Physics and Reality . World Scientific 1999
• The Solvay Conferences on Physics - aspects of the development of physics since 1911 . Dordrecht 1975
• The quantum principle - its interpretation and epistemology .

Web links

• Biography in the Jagdish Mehra Collection at Houston University Library
• Biography in Science World