Martin J. Klein

Martin Jesse Klein (born June 25, 1924 in New York City , † March 28, 2009 in Chapel Hill , North Carolina ) was an American physicist and historian of science .

life and work

Born to a couple of teachers in the Bronx , Klein attended James Monroe High School in New York (a classmate was Leon Max Lederman ), which he graduated in 1938. He studied physics at Columbia University ( Bachelor 1942, Master 1944) and, after military service from 1944 to 1946, at MIT , where he received his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1948 . From 1949 he was at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland (Ohio) , where he became professor of physics (1966/67 he was chairman of the physics department). In 1952/53 he was at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin(with Erwin Schrödinger ) as a National Research Fellow and in 1958/59 with a Guggenheim grant at the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics in Leiden , where he began his work on the history of physics with the publication of the collected works of Paul Ehrenfest . In 1967/68 he was again Guggenheim Fellow and from 1967 Professor of Physics History (and later Professor of Physics) at Yale University . In 1971 he became chairman of the science history department at Yale. From 1974 he was Eugene Higgins Professor for the History of Physics at Yale.

As a physicist, he worked on statistical mechanics and the theory of thin ferromagnetic layers.

Klein dealt with Ehrenfest's contributions to statistical mechanics and early quantum theory, as well as the early days of quantum theory at Max Planck and Albert Einstein (as early as the early 1960s). He published the letters on wave mechanics by Schrödinger, Einstein, Lorentz and Planck in English translation and dealt with the origins of Schrödinger's wave mechanics. He wrote the articles on Ehrenfest, Einstein, and Josiah Willard Gibbs for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography . He examined the early work on thermodynamics by Gibbs, his forerunner as a physics professor at Yale and one of the first major US physicists, and the development of statistical mechanics under Ludwig Boltzmann . He wrote the authoritative biography of Ehrenfest.

In addition to the publication of the works of Ehrenfest, from 1988 to 1998 he was also involved in the publication of volumes 3 to 6 of Albert Einstein's collected works at Princeton University Press. The volumes he edited cover the years 1909 to 1917, i.e. the decisive years in the development of the general theory of relativity , the final form of which dates from 1916.

He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the National Academy of Sciences (1977), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1979) and the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences in Paris (since 1971). In 2005 he received the American Physical Society's first Abraham Pais Prize for the History of Physics .

Klein was married three times and had a total of four daughters from different marriages.

Fonts

• Paul Ehrenfest - The Making of a theoretical physicist . 2 volumes. Elsevier, Amsterdam 1970–1985, ISBN 0-444-86948-4
• Physicists inaugural lectures in history . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 1993, ISBN 90-5356-057-2

literature

• AJ Kox and Daniel M. Siegel: No truth except in the details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein . Kluwer, Dordrecht 1995, ISBN 0-7923-3195-8 , ( Boston studies in the philosophy of science 167), (with Klein's bibliography, pp. 363-367).

Web links

• Pais price for little ones
• Obituary in the New York Times
• Obituary at physorg
• Biography at the APS