Kurt Gottfried

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Kurt Gottfried (* 1929 in Vienna ) is an Austro-American theoretical physicist .

Life

Kurt Gottfried was born in Vienna and emigrated to Canada in 1939. He studied at McGill University , Canada , where he made his bachelor's degree in 1951 and his master's degree in 1952. In 1955 he received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was then a Junior Fellow at Harvard University until 1958 . From 1958 to 1960 he worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen . In 1960 he became an assistant professor at Harvard. In 1964 he became an associate professor and 1968 professor at Cornell University . He has been Professor Emeritus there since 1998. Among other things, he was a visiting scientist at CERN and MIT.

Gottfried wrote a well-known quantum mechanics textbook (first published in 1966), wrote a two-volume introduction to elementary particle physics with Victor Weisskopf and dealt, among other things, with many-particle theory, the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and the physics of Charmonium . In addition, he is involved in security and disarmament issues, especially in the nuclear field, also in the 1980s with Richard Garwin , Henry W. Kendall , Hans Bethe and others against the " Star Wars " program of the Reagan administration. In 2007, in an open letter to the US Senate and Congress, together with other physicists such as Edwin Salpeter , he criticized the Bush administration for its threat against Iran to use nuclear weapons if necessary.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and on its council. In 1992 he received the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award . From 1999 to 2009 he headed the Union of Concerned Scientists , which he helped to found. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

Fonts

  • with Tung-Mow Yan: Quantum Mechanics - Fundamentals , Springer 2003 (first without Yan in Benjamin 1966, Addison-Wesley 1988) ISBN 0-387-22023-2
  • with Victor Weisskopf : Concepts of particle physics , 2 volumes, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1984, 1986
  • with Bruce Blair (Editor): Crisis stability and nuclear war , Oxford University Press 1988
  • with M. Bell, Martinus Veltman (editor): John S. Bell and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics , World Scientific 2001 (with the same authors he also edited the collected works of Bell)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gottfried Collective Excitations of Fermi gases , Nuovo Cimento Vol. 13, 1959, p. 849, reprinted in David Pines : The many body problem 1962
  2. ↑ for example Gottfried Does quantum mechanics carry the seed of its own destruction? , Physics World, October 1991
  3. ↑ Estia Eichten , Tung-Mow Yan, Tōichirō Kinoshita , Kenneth Lane , Gottfried Charmonium: The Model , Physical Review D, Vol. 17, 1978, p. 3090, same: Charmonium: Comparison with Experiment , Physical Review D, Vol. 20 , 1980, p. 203, same, John Kogut Spectrum of charmed quark-antiquark bound states , Physical Review Letters, Vol. 34, 1975, pp. 369-372
  4. ↑ Cornell Chronicle, February 2007 . Bush said on April 18, 2006 that the use of nuclear weapons " is an option ".
personal data
SURNAME Gottfried, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna