Ludwig Glaser (physicist)

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Ludwig Glaser (* 1889 ; † probably 1945 ) was a German applied physicist who was a leading exponent of the Nazi “ German physics ”.

Live and act

He was the son of the patent attorney and railway engineer Friedrich Carl Glaser (1843-1910), founder of the magazine Glasers Annalen für Gewerbe und Bauwesen .

Glaser studied at the Polytechnic and the University of Berlin and at Imperial College London . He received his doctorate as an engineer and worked from 1915 to 1921 at the company Krupp , already had his father with his engineering firm close relations. At the same time he published Glaser's annals from 1916 to 1921. He was a protégé of Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard . As a student of Stark at the University of Würzburg , he had difficulties getting his habilitation , which was one reason why Stark left the university in 1922. Glaser completed his habilitation in Würzburg in 1921 with a thesis on testing, performance and properties of optical diffraction gratings and ways to improve them, and was later given a professorship.

In 1932 he joined the NSDAP . He published anti-Semitic essays, represented, like his teachers Stark and Lenard, “ Aryan physics ” and was a staunch opponent of relativity and quantum theory as early as the 1920s , both the older ones by Niels Bohr and Arnold Sommerfeld and the newer ones.

From 1939 he was assistant to Wilhelm Müller at the University of Munich . He was mentioned on October 27, 1942 in a letter from Horst Teichmann to Wilhelm Müller, in which the break between Müller and Glaser was mentioned, but Glaser was also awarded services in physics. Müller described him as an authority in the field of (spectro-optical) precision measurements. Mark Walker describes him as an ambitious and competent scientific entrepreneur with his own laboratory, who offered physical-chemical investigations (spectral analysis, metallurgy) and also (like his father) was active in the patent area.

Around 1941, Glazer's public appearance became too eccentric and radical for representatives of German physics such as Müller and he was pushed off to the University of Posen as the provisional director of an institute for applied physics. There he gave lectures on "the Jewish question" in science. He got into trouble because he had taken equipment with him from Munich without a permit and had ordered a wind tunnel from a company where his brother was employed, also without a permit. He was deported to the University of Prague , where he (Mark Walker) probably died at the end of World War II.

literature

  • Mark Walker : Nazi Science. Myth, Truth and the Atomic Bomb. Plenary session 1995
  • Klaus Hentschel (editor): Physics and National Socialism. Birkhäuser 1996
    • With the imprint of the English translation by Ludwig Glaser: Jews in Physics. Jewish physics. In: Journal for the whole of natural science. Volume 5, November 1939, pp. 272-275. In addition to violent attacks on Einstein (whom he describes as a "pest" and a Jewish politician), he also attacks Hermann von Helmholtz as the patron of Jewish physicists, counts Jewish physicists in Germany to support his theses, especially in Berlin and Munich, and attacks Werner Heisenberg as Representative of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. He describes himself and his colleagues Lenard, Stark, Ernst Gehrcke , Karl Uller and Hugo Dingler as isolated for a long time and only sees a final breakthrough in curbing Jewish influence in physics in Germany with the Reichskristallnacht in 1938.
  • Ludwig Glaser: Jewish Spirit in Physics. In: Journal for the whole of natural science. Volume 5, 1939, pp. 162-175

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Erhard Born:  Glaser, Friedrich Carl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 430 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Some colleagues mocked the fact that he did his habilitation on porcelain, which gave him the derisive nickname Dr. porc. entered, but his public appearance against Einstein also played a role. Mark Walker Nazi Science , p. 11
  3. ↑ Another important reason was that he wanted to set up a porcelain factory, but it was not successful
  4. ↑ First publications were made by him in 1920 (About attempts to confirm the theory of relativity on observation, Glaser's Annalen, No. 1036, August 1920, pp. 29-33) and he spoke at a meeting of Paul Weyland against the theory of relativity. In the 1920s, according to Walker, scientific arguments against the theory of relativity still predominated and there was still no trace of his later virulent anti-Semitism (Walker, Nazi Science, p. 11)
  5. ↑ I am very interested in your reference that you have broken off completely with Professor Glaser, since despite everything you are apparently right to accuse him of, he was one of those people within the Munich circle in which I got to know him at the time, who really did understands something about physics, which one cannot say about Dingler at all and about Thuringia only to an extremely limited extent , cited in Freddy Litten: Mechanik und Antisemitismus - Wilhelm Müller (1880–1968) , Algorismus, Heft 34. Munich 2000, excerpt
  6. ↑ Müller: The situation of theoretical physics at the universities. In: Journal for the whole of natural science. Volume 6, November / December 1940, pp. 281–289, printed in English translation in Hentschel (Ed.): Physics and National Socialism. Birkhäuser 1996, p. 251
  7. ↑ Mark Walker, loc. cit., p. 11
  8. ↑ Walker, loc. cit., p. 56
personal data
SURNAME Glaser, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1889
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: 1945