Nicholas Kemmer
Nicholas Kemmer , born Nikolai Pawlowitsch Kemmer ( December 7, 1911 in St. Petersburg , † October 21, 1998 in Edinburgh ), was a British theoretical physicist ( nuclear physics ) with Russian-German roots.
Kemmer was the son of the engineer Paul Kemmer and Barbara Stutzer. They moved to London in 1916 and to Germany in 1921, where he attended the Bismarck School in Hanover (Abitur 1929). There they also took German citizenship. He studied with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg in Göttingen , where he graduated in 1933. He then went to Zurich , where he received his doctorate in 1936 under Gregor Wentzel (and Wolfgang Pauli ) . He was also Pauli's assistant for a short time. From 1936 to 1940 he taught at Imperial College in London , where he was with a Beit Fellowship, and during the war at Cambridge University , while at the same time working on the British atomic bomb project ("Tube Alloys Project"), and from 1944 to 1946 in Canada was at Chalk River Laboratories . In 1942 he became a British citizen. After the war he was back in Cambridge in 1946 (first as a Fellow of Trinity College , then as a Stokes Lecturer) and worked with John Cockcroft on the British nuclear reactor project. From 1953 to 1979 he was Tait Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh (chosen by his former teacher Born, who was retiring in Edinburgh ).
In 1954 he became a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1956 of the Royal Society . In 1966 he received the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society. In 1983 he received the Max Planck Medal .
Kemmer predicted the existence of positive, negative and neutral pions in 1938 (from his charge-symmetric theory of nuclear forces). After his student Freeman Dyson, he never received the recognition he deserved for this prediction and was covered with an extensive teaching workload at Cambridge, so that he had little time for research work.
His students include Abdus Salam , Paul Taunton Matthews , Ron Shaw (who did his doctorate with Salam because Kemmer went to Edinburgh) and Richard Dalitz .
He had been married since 1947 and had two sons and a daughter.
Web links
- Nicholas Kemmer in the nndb (English)
- Short biography with Janus , Cambridge manuscript collection (English)
supporting documents
- ↑ Laurie M. Brown et al., Obituary for Nicholas Kemmer (1911-1998), in: Physikalische Blätter 55, 2 (1999), p. 59.
- ^ Dyson: George Green and I.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kemmer, Nicholas |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kemmer, Nikolaus Pawlowitsch (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 7, 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | St. Petersburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 21, 1998 |
| Place of death | Edinburgh |