Markus Fierz

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Markus Fierz (probably 1937 at a colloquium with Nobel Prize winners)

Markus Eduard Fierz (born June 20, 1912 in Basel ; † June 20, 2006 in Küsnacht ) was a Swiss theoretical physicist who mainly worked on quantum field theory .

Markus Eduard Fierz's father, Hans Eduard Fierz, was a chemist at Geigy and later a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Fierz attended the Realgymnasium in Zurich. From 1931 he began his studies in Göttingen , where he a. a. heard from Hermann Weyl , and went back to the ETH in 1933, where he studied physics with Wolfgang Pauli and Gregor Wentzel and received his doctorate in 1936 with Wentzel, where he discovered the infrared problem of quantum electrodynamics in his doctoral thesis . He then went to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig (from where he and Heisenberg attended a conference with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen) and in 1936 became assistant to Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich (Heisenberg had recommended him). In his habilitation in 1939 he dealt with relativistic fields of arbitrary spins (with and without mass) and proved the spin statistics theorem for free fields. In 1940 he became a private lecturer in Basel and in 1943 an assistant professor. From 1944 to 1959 he was professor for theoretical physics in Basel. In the winter of 1950/51 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he met Res Jost . In 1959/1960 he headed the theory department at CERN in Geneva for one year and in 1960 succeeded his teacher Pauli as professor at the ETH. In 1977 he was retired there. Fierz also worked on gravitational theory, but only published part of it.

Fierz also dealt with the history of science, specifically Isaac Newton . According to Charles Enz , he was Wolfgang Pauli's most trusted interlocutor among all physicists.

In 1979 he received the Max Planck Medal . In 1989 he received the Albert Einstein Medal .

Since 1940 he was married to Menga Biber, whom he met while making music (he played the violin). He had two sons with her.

His twin brother Heinrich Karl Fierz was a well-known psychiatrist (as was his mother Linda, née David, who also belonged to the school of Carl Gustav Jung ).

literature

  • Markus Fierz: Lectures on the history of the development of mechanics . Springer 1972
  • Fierz Science and History - Lectures and Articles , Birkhäuser 1988
  • Charles Enz No time to be brief , Oxford University Press 2002, p. 313

Web links

Commons : Markus Eduard Fierz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

  1. , which was then treated by Felix Bloch and Arnold Nordsieck in 1937. Fierz could not convince Heisenberg of the existence of the divergences
  2. Fierz Helvetica Physica Acta, Vol. 12, 1939, p. 3. Expanded on the QED in Fierz, Pauli Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Vol. 173, 1939, 221. The work on relativistic fields of arbitrary spins was later in the Supergravity important.
  3. generally proven by Wolfgang Pauli 1940
  4. Fierz On the Origin and Meaning of Isaac Newton's Doctrine of Absolute Space , In: Gesnerus , Volume 11, 1954, pp. 62-120, Newton's Concept of Mathematics and the Mathematical Form of Principia , Helvetica Physica Acta, Volume 41, 1968 , Pp. 821–826, Isaac Newton als Mathematician , Zurich 1972
  5. Enz No time to be brief , p. 313