Jean-Pierre Vigier (physicist)

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Jean-Pierre Vigier (approx. 2003)

Jean-Pierre Vigier (born January 16, 1920 in Paris ; † March 4, 2004 ibid) was a French physicist , resistance fighter and political activist .

Life

career

Vigier grew up in Geneva and attended the University of Montpellier from 1939 . In 1940 he was drafted into the army. After the French defeat, he joined the Resistance and joined the French Communist Party at the same time . In 1941 he resumed his studies in Montpellier and, at the same time, in Geneva. In 1946 he received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Geneva . He then worked for Frédéric Joliot-Curie in the newly established French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). When Joliot-Curie had to leave the CEA in 1949 because he did not want to work on the French atomic bomb project, Vigier switched to the Center national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and was initially assistant and later Maître de recherches in Louis de Broglie's laboratory . Vigier was his assistant until de Broglie's retirement in 1962, and he continued to work with him afterwards. Finally, Vigier received a professorship at the University of Paris VI (Pierre et Marie Curie).

Vigier was supposed to become Albert Einstein's assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the early 1950s , but was not given a visa to enter the United States because of his communist views .

Resistance fighter and activist

Vigier attended an international school in Geneva and was politicized early on by the events of the Spanish Civil War . From 1940 he was a member of the Communist Party and active for the Resistance in the Savoy Alps . In 1942 he was arrested by police officers from the Vichy regime and was supposed to be extradited to the Gestapo in Lyon , headed by Klaus Barbie , but the train was bombed by the British en route and he was able to escape. In 1944 he fought as an officer in the French army in Alsace and Rhineland-Palatinate against Germany, where he was wounded. As an opponent of the French colonial war in Indochina , he left the army shortly after the Second World War . In the 1950s he was a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party and acted against the Algerian War . In 1961 he was expelled from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In the 1960s he demonstrated against the Vietnam War of the Americans and their allies and testified as an expert before the Russell Tribunal . He was also committed to the “anti-imperialist” struggle in Latin America on the part of Fidel Castro . Since he was involved in various groups outside the Communist Party in May 1968 (Vigier was among other things editor-in-chief of the militant magazine Action founded by Jean Schalit ), he was expelled from the Communist Party. In an article published in Le Monde on July 22, 1976, he criticized the conditions of detention for members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and described the Federal Republic of Germany as a “peculiar mixture of American technocracy and paranazist state apparatus”. He was a member of the international commission of inquiry that was set up in August 1976 and investigated the death of RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof in the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison . The Commission's final report was delivered on December 15, 1978 and casts doubt on the “suicide report”.

Work as a physicist

Vigier is known for looking for alternatives to the usual interpretation of quantum mechanics , which he and his teacher de Broglie rejected, whereby his basic Marxist attitude was also influential (he was a supporter of determinism ). He worked closely with de Broglie, who published a book on Vigier's theory in 1961. In his “stochastic interpretation” of quantum mechanics, he was also influenced by the work of David Bohm . He published with de Broglie until the early 1970s and pursued his deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics until the 1990s. Vigier also studied cosmology and was an opponent of the big bang theory . He has published over 300 scientific papers and was co-editor of Physics Letters A .

Honors

Vigier received the Médaille de la Résistance and was a member of the Legion of Honor .

Fonts

  • Recherches sur l'interprétation causale de la théorie des quanta . Gauthier-Villars, 1955 ( Thèse d'État von Vigier at the University of Paris 1954)
  • Structure of the micro-objet dans l'interprétation causale de la théorie des quanta . Gauthier-Villars, 1956. (with foreword by Louis de Broglie)
  • with David Bohm: Model of the Causal Interpretation of Quantum Theory in Terms of a Fluid with Irregular Fluctuations . In: Physical Review , Vol. 96, 1954, pp. 208-216.
  • with Bohm, de Broglie, P. Hillion, F. Halbwachs and T. Takabayasi: Rotator Model of Elementary Particles Considered as Relativistic Extended Structures in Minkowski Space . In: Physical Review , Vol. 129, 1963, pp. 438-450.

literature

  • Obituary in Physics Letters A , Vol. 328, 2004.
  • Stanley Jeffers, Bo Lehnert, Nils Abramson and Lev Chebotarev (eds.): Jean-Pierre Vigier and the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics . Apeiron, 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Myron W. Evans: Advances in Chemical Physics, Modern Nonlinear Optics , Part 3, p. 165. John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
  2. ↑ He was the weapons inspector for General Lattre de Tassigny
  3. ↑ Members, witnesses, experts of the Russell Tribunal ( Memento of the original from November 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.911review.org
  4. ^ Vigier, Technical aspects of fragmentation bombs
  5. ↑ Ulrich Pfeil: The “other” Franco-German relations , p. 481f. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar, 2004
  6. ^ J. Smith and André Moncourt: The Red Army Faction , p. 382. PM Press, Oakland, CA., 2009.
  7. ↑ In German translation Introduction to the theory of elementary particles by Jean-Pierre Vigier and colleagues , Karlsruhe, Braun 1965, English translation Elsevier 1963, French original Gauthier-Villars 1961. With a contribution by Vigier himself.
  8. ↑ for example Vigier Explicit mathematical construction of relativistic nonlinear de Broglie waves described by three-dimensional (wave and electromagnetic) solitons "piloted" (controlled) by corresponding solutions of associated linear Klein-Gordon and Schrödinger equations , Foundations of Physics, Volume 21, 1991, pp. 125-148, Vigier Particular solutions of a non-linear Schrödinger equation carrying particle-like singularities represent possible models of de Broglie's double solution theory , Physics Letters A, Volume 135, 1989, pp. 99-105
personal data
SURNAME Vigier, Jean-Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 2004
Place of death Paris