Konrad Bleuler

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Konrad Bleuler (born September 23, 1912 in Herzogenbuchsee , Switzerland ; † January 1, 1992 in Königswinter ) was a Swiss physicist . He made contributions to theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory .

Life

Bleuler's grandfather was President of the ETH Zurich . Bleuler studied physics (and engineering subjects) at the ETH Zurich from 1931 to 1936, initially with the aim of going into industry. But then he switched to theoretical physics and heard from Wolfgang Pauli , with whom he wrote a thesis on quantum electrodynamics in 1935. He received his doctorate in 1942 under Michel Plancherel at the ETH with the mathematical thesis "About the Rolle's theorem for the operator Δu + λu and the properties of Green's function related to it ". Bleuler was first assistant to Ernst Stueckelberg in Geneva and then (from 1943) to Gregor Wentzel at the ETH, where he received his habilitation and became a private lecturer and in 1945 he became an associate professor. In the 1940s and 1950s he made extended visits to Rome, Birmingham, Stockholm, Helsinki and Genoa. In 1957 he became a professor at the University of Neuchatel. From 1960 to 1980 he was a professor at the University of Bonn , where he founded the Institute for Theoretical Nuclear Physics, which today belongs to the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics . Even after his retirement , he remained active there until his death (from a brain tumor). The chair and institute was headed by Max Georg Huber from 1983 until his retirement in 2002 .

In 1971, Bleuler was involved in founding the International Conference on Differential Geometric Methods in Theoretical Physics and has been a regular organizer since then, most recently in 1990 at the 19th conference in Rapallo . In 1993 he was awarded a “Bleuler Medal” in his honor at the 22nd conference. 

plant

Bleuler's most important contribution is the Gupta-Bleuler formalism developed together with Suraj N. Gupta for the quantization of the electromagnetic field . In this way, a problem caused by the calibration invariance of the field could be circumvented in that the transversality of physical photons is impressed on the state space via the disappearance of the expected value of an operator, which thus receives an indefinite metric. This was important work on quantum electrodynamics .

Bleuler has also worked on nuclear and particle physics topics. As early as the 1950s, he was concerned with the meson theory of nuclear forces. The Bonn model of the nuclear forces, which parameterized them according to meson exchange models, goes back to him.

He also wrote about the work of other famous scientists, such as Wolfgang Pauli and Rolf Nevanlinna  .

Others

During his time in Neuchatel, Bleuler also got to know the writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt , to whom he introduced many of the physicists who gave lectures at his university (such as Wolfgang Pauli). This was an important source of inspiration for Dürrenmatt's play Die Physiker .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles Enz No time to be brief. A scientific biography of Wolfgang Pauli , Oxford University Press 1992, p. 293.
  2. ^ The Mathematics Genealogy Project: Konrad Bleuler
  3. ↑ Enz No time to be brief , p. 440.
  4. ^ Max Georg Huber Konrad Bleuler , in Goeke, Kroll, Petry (editor) Quark Cluster Dynamics , Lecture Notes in Physics, Springer Verlag 1993
  5. ^ Department of Physics and Astronomy at Bonn University: The history of physics ( Memento from May 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Jörg Resag: The Limits of Computability - Incompleteness and Chance in Mathematics, Chapter 5.5.4
  7. ↑ Shahn Majid: Bleuler Medal 1993. Accessed on October 12, 2018 (English).
  8. ↑ Bleuler A New Method for the Treatment of Longitudinal and Scalar Photons , Helv.phys.acta Vol. 23, 1950, p. 567, Gupta's article is "Quantum mechanics with an indefinite metric.", Canadian Journal of Physics, Vol. 35, 1957, pp. 961-968.
  9. ^ J. Haidenbauer: Meson-exchange models . In: Institute for Nuclear Physics, Forschungszentrum Jülich (Ed.): COZY-Summerschool and Workshop . 2002, p. 21 ( archive.org [PS; 2.2 MB ]).
  10. ↑ Konrad Bleuler: "Wolfgang Pauli - about his work and his ideas on the fundamentals of physics". In: Geometry and theoretical physics, Berlin, 1991, 298-303.
  11. ^ Konrad Bleuler: "Rolf Nevanlinna: A great mathematician's ideas about physics in the light of recent achievements". In: Arkhimedes 41 (1) (1989), 25-32.
  12. ↑ Enz No time to be brief , pp. 520f.
personal data
SURNAME Bleuler, Konrad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Herzogenbuchsee , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1992
Place of death Koenigswinter