Max woe

Max Jammer, 2003

Max Jammer ( Moshe Jammer ; born April 13, 1915 in Berlin , † December 18, 2010 in Jerusalem ) was a German-born Israeli physicist, science historian and philosopher.

Life

After graduating from high school in 1932 , Jammer studied physics , mathematics and philosophy at the University of Vienna and from 1935 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he received his diploma in 1936 and his doctorate in 1942 with an experimental physics work. He served in the British Army during World War II and then lectured in the history of science and philosophy of science at Hebrew University. In 1952 he became a lecturer at Harvard University (during this time he also had close contact with Albert Einstein at Princeton) and later at the University of Oklahoma and Boston University . In 1959 he became professor of physics and chairman of the physics faculty at the newly founded Bar Ilan University in Israel, where he was rector in 1962 and president from 1967 to 1968. He was also a co-founder of the Institute for Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University . Among other things, he was visiting professor at the ETH Zurich , the University of Göttingen , the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris , the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC

Since his first book “Concepts of Space” from 1954, Jammer has been involved in fundamental investigations of important concepts of physics (space, energy and force, mass, fundamentals of quantum mechanics, simultaneity) under physical as well as historical and philosophical Aspects known. He wrote about it in each case highly regarded monographs, valued by philosophers as well as by historians of science. To this end, he held talks with many important pioneers in modern physics (such as David Bohm , Paul Dirac , Max Born , Werner Heisenberg , Louis de Broglie and Pascual Jordan ).

In 2007 he received the Abraham Pais Prize for Physics Historians. He also received the Israel Prize in 1984 and the Israeli EMET Prize in 2003. For his book "Einstein and Religion" he received a book prize from the Templeton Foundation. He received the American Academy of Arts and Sciences monograph award .

Fonts

• The problem of space - the development of space theories , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 2nd expanded edition 1980, English original: Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics . Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1954; New York: Harper, 1960; 2nd edition, Harvard UP, 1969; 3rd edition New York: Dover, 1993. ISBN 0-486-27119-6 . (Foreword by Albert Einstein)
• Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics . Cambridge (Mass): Harvard UP, 1957 New York: Harper, 1962 New York: Dover, 1999. ISBN 0-486-40689-X
• The concept of mass in physics , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1964, English original: Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics . Cambridge (Mass): Harvard UP, 1961 New York: Harper, 1964 New York: Dover, 1997. ISBN 0-486-29998-8
• Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. ISBN 0-691-01017-X - Online
• The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966; 2nd ed: New York: American Institute of Physics, 1989. ISBN 0-88318-617-9
• The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: The Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in Historical Perspective . New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1974. ISBN 0-471-43958-4
• Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-691-10297-X
• Concepts of Simultaneity: From Antiquity to Einstein and Beyond . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. ISBN 0-8018-8422-5
• Energy , in Donald Borchert (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Vol. 3, Thomson Gale, 2nd edition 2005

Web links

• Biography on the occasion of the APS Pais Prize
• Brief biography