Jules-Émile Verschaffelt

Schaffelt 1927

Jules-Émile Verschaffelt (* 27. January 1870 in Ghent ; † 22. December 1955 in The Hague ) was a Belgian from Flanders originating physicist .

Life

Verschaffelt was born in Ghent in 1870. There he attended the ancient language Athenaeum from 1880 and began studying at the university in his hometown in 1888 , which he completed in 1893 with a doctorate with distinction. Although Dutch was spoken in Ghent , he received his education almost exclusively in French , since French was the official language and the language of higher education in Belgium at that time. In contrast, the Flemish dialect of Dutch had only a minor status and was only taught in elementary schools. Verschaffelt only learned to express himself in his native language during his studies at the suggestion of his surroundings.

After completing his doctorate, Verschaffelt devoted himself increasingly to physics , chemistry and especially crystallography . On a two-year scholarship, he went to the Netherlands , where he trained with van der Waals and Van 't Hoff in 1893 and with HA Lorentz in Leiden in 1894 . After the scholarship expired, he worked as a laboratory assistant in Leiden. There he met his future wife Elisabeth Ebert. Since he wanted to continue his academic career in the Netherlands, he had to do his doctorate at a Dutch university because the Belgian title was not recognized. In 1896 he received his doctorate from Kamerlingh Onnes . From 1898 to 1906 he was a university lecturer for physics in Dordrecht . In 1906 he became a professor at the University of Brussels and returned to Belgium. After the outbreak of World War I and the German occupation of Belgium , he and his family fled to the northern, neutral Netherlands in 1914, where he got a job in the laboratory of Kamerlingh Onnes.

After the war, Verschaffelt returned to the (now Dutch-speaking) University of Ghent in 1923, where he was given a full professorship in 1929 and worked until 1940. Also because of his good language skills (Dutch, French, German) he worked as secretary of the Solvay conferences , where the leading theoretical physicists of the time met in Brussels .

During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II , he refused to cooperate with the pro-German Flemish movement , which earned him several months in prison in 1943. After the death of his wife in 1946, he moved to the Netherlands.

Scientific work

The main area of ​​work and research was work on thermodynamics , capillary phenomena , entropy and the irreversibility of physical processes. He was involved in several hundred scientific papers.

Web links

Commons : Jules-Émile Verschaffelt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Scientists of the Dutch School: Schaffelt. Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Arts, archived from the original on March 5, 2007 (English). 
• Vlaams Instituut voor Geschiedenis (Ed.): Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek . 2011, p. 903 (Dutch, knaw.nl ).