Max Abraham

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Max Abraham (around 1905)

Max Abraham (born March 26, 1875 in Danzig ; † November 16, 1922 in Munich ) was a German theoretical physicist .

Life

Abraham came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family. He studied physics at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1897 under Max Planck ; then he worked as an assistant at Planck. From 1900 to 1909 he was an unpaid private lecturer in Göttingen. In 1909 he found a job at the University of Illinois (USA), but returned to Göttingen after a few months. At the invitation of Tullio Levi-Civita , he went to Milan, where he became a professor of rational mechanics. At the beginning of the First World War he had to return to Germany, where he held a physics professorship at the Technical University of Stuttgart. In 1921 he was given a chair in Aachen, but a little later he fell ill with a brain tumor and died the following year.

plant

Most of Abraham's scientific work was directly related to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism ; He wrote a two-volume work on electrodynamics ("Theory of Electricity"), which was quickly reissued as a standard work and revised several times. The first volume (1904) was an adaptation of the book of the same name by August Föppl (1894), whereas the second volume (1905) was written by Abraham alone.

Around 1902 he developed a theory that electrons were perfect rigid spheres with a charge evenly distributed over the surface. It was the first field theoretical conception of the electron, which had a great influence on the further development of electron theory. In doing so, he coined the terms "longitudinal" and "transversal" electromagnetic mass, whereby his statements initially seemed to agree better with the experiments of Walter Kaufmann (1901, 1905) than the corresponding formulas for "relativistic mass" by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Albert Einstein . This changed only through the experiments of Alfred Bucherer (1908) and others. He rejected the principle of relativity or the theory of relativity at all - although he understood it more quickly than many others - because it contradicted the assumption of an electromagnetic nature of all physical processes. Abraham also preferred to cling to the ether hypothesis, which he found to be more in line with "common sense".

He conducted an extensive correspondence with Einstein and was finally convinced (around 1912) that the special theory of relativity was logically correct; nevertheless, he found them unsuitable for describing physical reality. In addition, he drafted his own theory of gravity, which in this context led to a dispute with Einstein. Abraham (1912) believed that Einstein had given the "coup de grace" during his work on the equivalence principle by giving up the unrestricted validity of the light constancy of the special relativity theory, but this was immediately rejected by Einstein. Despite the differences of opinion, Einstein acknowledged that Abraham was one of the few who understood his efforts in developing general relativity - even if he refused.

After his death, Max Born and Max von Laue wrote about him in an obituary:

He loved his absolute ether, his field equations, his rigid electrons just as a young man loved his first love, the memories of which no later experiences can erase.

See also

Publications

Wikisource: Max Abraham  - Sources and full texts
  • Abraham, M. & Föppl. A .: Theory of Electricity: Introduction to Maxwell's Theory of Electricity . Teubner, Leipzig 1904.

literature

  • Pais, Abraham : "The Lord God is refined ...": Albert Einstein, a scientific biography . Spectrum, Heidelberg 1982/2000, ISBN 3827405297 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Abraham, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1922
Place of death Munich