Marcel Schein

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Marcel Schein (born June 9, 1902 in Trstená , Austria-Hungary , † February 20, 1960 in Chicago ) was an American physicist of Hungarian origin. His research focus was the physics of cosmic rays .

Life

Marcel Schein was born in 1902, the younger of two sons of a banker, into a German-speaking, Jewish family in the small town of Trstená, now part of Slovakia, in the Arwa County of the then Kingdom of Hungary in the Tatra Mountains ; besides German, he also spoke fluent Hungarian . Schein's brother Nicholas later emigrated to South America. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy , Marcel Schein became a Czechoslovak citizen. He broke away from Judaism and became an agnostic . Schein studied physics at the Universities of Vienna and Würzburg as well as at the University of Zurich , where he received his doctorate in 1927. His doctoral supervisor was Edgar Meyer . Schein's dissertation on the fine structure and the Zeeman effect of the mercury resonance line was printed in 1928 in the journal Annalen der Physik . He also got his first job at the ETH as a physics assistant. From 1929 to 1930 he spent a year in Chicago on a Rockefeller Fellowship . In 1932 he completed his habilitation in Zurich with a paper on the reflection and absorption of long-wave X-rays .

In 1927 he married Hilde Schoenbeck, a physics doctoral student, in Zurich. Schoenbeck was the only daughter of the German civil engineer Max Schoenbeck and his wife Selma, who lived in Bad Schandau , Saxony . After the marriage, Hilde Schein gave up her scientific work. The son Edgar Schein was born in 1928 . Marcel Schein and his wife were athletic and practiced long hikes, mountaineering and other sports.

In 1934, political difficulties between Switzerland and Czechoslovakia meant that Schein, as a Czech citizen, could not keep his Zurich assistant professorship and had to leave Switzerland. Between two vacancies from China ( Nanking University ) and the Soviet Union , he chose the latter and moved to Odessa in November 1934 (according to other sources in 1935) , where he had been offered an important position for the development of the Soviet scientific establishment. It was about the management of a laboratory that also had access to high-altitude research stations in the Caucasus , especially on the Elbrus, which is over 5600 m high . The family lived in Odessa under privileged conditions in very good material circumstances that were comparable to those in Zurich.

In the face of Stalinist "waves of purges" , Schein decided in 1937 to leave the country and initially moved with his family to Prague , leaving the majority of the family's household effects behind in Odessa. At this point, Schein had already taken steps to emigrate to the United States . He intensified these efforts in view of the threat to Czechoslovakia from National Socialist Germany . Schein's wife and son moved to Zurich for six months and in 1938 the entire family emigrated to the USA, where Marcel Schein got a job in Chicago at the invitation of Arthur Holly Compton and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation . Schein worked at the University of Chicago until his death , where he held a full professorship from 1946.

On February 20, 1960, Marcel Schein died in Chicago at the age of 57 after suffering a heart attack while ice skating.

Services

In the early years of his career in Zurich, Schein made some significant contributions to the physics of X-rays . However, his most famous works concern the physics of cosmic rays . In the mid-1930s it was known that the cosmic primary radiation consisted largely of positively charged particles; what kind these were, however, was unknown. From 1938 to 1941, Schein carried out a series of experiments with balloon probes to investigate cosmic radiation in the highest altitudes of the earth's atmosphere and was able to prove that these particles could not be electrons (or positrons ), as their properties did not match the already known behavior of high-energy electrons corresponded; it had to be protons .

Then he concentrated on the most energetic parts of cosmic rays and their interactions with atomic nuclei . He was one of the first to investigate nuclear reactions at energies that were far beyond the values ​​achievable by scientific particle accelerators at the time. A few days before his death he returned from a large sea-based measurement campaign he had organized in the Caribbean , from the deck of the Essex-class aircraft carrier Valley Forge and with the participation of six destroyers and four Lockheed Super Constellation aircraft of the American armed forces the largest number of balloon-supported core emulsions from the manufacturer Ilford had been brought into the upper stratosphere by means of research balloons with a diameter of about 100 m up to a height of 30 km .

Works (selection)

  • Marcel Schein: About the fine structure and the Zeeman effect of the mercury resonance line . In: Annals of Physics . Fourth episode, volume 85 , no. 3 , 1928, pp. 257–312 , doi : 10.1002 / andp.19283900302 ( digital copy [PDF; 2.5 MByte] at wiley.com ; also dissertation, University of Zurich).
  • Marcel Schein: Optical measurements on the mercury atom . Published by the Schnyder von Wartensee Foundation. Emil Birkhäuser & Cie., Basel 1929 ( online at nmu.org.ua ).
  • Marcel Schein: About the reflection and absorption of long-wave X-rays . Zurich 1932 (Phil. II. Sect. Habilitation thesis).
  • Marcel Schein, William P. Jesse, EO Wollan: The Nature of the Primary Cosmic Radiation and the Origin of the Mesotron . In: Physical Review . Vol. 59, April 1, 1941, pp. 615 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.59.615 .
  • Marcel Schein, Donald Joseph Montgomery: Problems in cosmic ray physics . Princeton University, 1946.

literature

  • Marcel Schein, Physicist, Dead; Scientist Helped to Develop the Atom Bomb - Leader in Cosmic Ray Research . In: The New York Times . February 21, 1960 (English, nytimes.com - obituary).
  • Dr. Marcel Schein, U. of C. Cosmic Ray Expert, Dies . In: Chicago Tribune . February 21, 1960, p. 8 (English, obituary).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Bruno Rossi : Prof. Marcel Schein . Obituary. In: Nature . Vol. 186, No. 4722, April 30, 1960, pp. 355–356 , doi : 10.1038 / 186355a0 ( digital copy at nature.com [PDF; 3.3 MB ]).
  2. ↑ a b c d e Edgar H. Schein : Becoming American: My First Learning Journey . iUniverse, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4917-8986-5 (English, 140 pages, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  3. ^ A b Edgar H. Schein : From Brainwashing to Organizational Therapy: A Conceptual and Empirical Journey in Search of 'Systemic' Health and a General Model of Change Dynamics: A Drama in Five Acts . In: Organization Studies . Vol. 27, No. 2, 2006, p. 287–301 , here p. 288 , doi : 10.1177 / 0170840606061831 ( digitized from sehity.com [PDF; 100 kB ]).
  4. ↑ Entry of the dissertation at Worldcat , accessed on November 28, 2019.
  5. ↑ Entry of the habilitation thesis at Worldcat , accessed on August 24, 2019.
  6. ^ A b John Lear: The courtesies of research . In: The New Scientist . February 25, 1960, p. 458 ( digitized version in the Google book search).
personal data
SURNAME Schein, Marcel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1960
Place of death Chicago