Otto Halpern

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Otto Halpern (born April 25, 1899 in Vienna , † October 28, 1982 in London ) was an Austrian theoretical physicist.

Life

Halpern was the son of a doctor, attended the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna and studied at the University of Vienna with Hans Thirring and received his doctorate in 1922 (on photophoresis). After that he was an assistant at Thirring. His habilitation, which he was aiming for in 1926, was thwarted for anti-Semitic reasons at the university by a  right-wing clique of professors around the palaeontologist Othenio Abel, known as the bear cave . The habilitation process grew into a scandal. His scientific suitability was undisputed, but his opponents constructed personal reasons for unsuitability ( incompatibility with colleagues ). The commission clearly voted for Halpern, but a month later the professors voted against it. Halpern litigated the decision and also achieved partial success in court, which was of no use to him at the university. In 1932 he was also defeated before the administrative court.

Halpern had previously given up his plans for a career in Vienna and in 1928/29 went to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig on a Rockefeller scholarship , who recommended him to the USA. In 1930 he went to New York and became a professor at New York University . There he worked with Gregory Breit and after his departure in 1934 became chairman of the physics faculty. There he dealt with the most varied areas of theoretical physics (especially neutron physics) and was active in the weekly theoretical colloquium of New York physicists at Columbia University. In 1931 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

During the Second World War, he worked in radar research at MIT's Radiation Laboratory and invented a paint for aircraft that minimized radar echo (called HARP). The invention was classified as secret at the time and Halpern was not granted a patent. After the war, he fought in court in a process that went up to the Supreme Court and received a high severance payment from the US government (around $ 340,000 in 1960). He also received the Science Defense Department Medal for the invention.

After the war he went to Southern California and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. He stayed there until a car accident in 1961. However, he continued to be scientifically active and moved to Vienna in 1965 (where he lived for three years) and then to London.

He translated and edited the Statistical Mechanics by Ralph H. Fowler into German (1931). Together with Rabi he was one of the discoverers of Julian Schwinger , with whom he published in 1935 when he was just 16 years old. A 1937 work with Montgomery H. Johnson on neutron scattering (and the interaction of the neutron's magnetic moment with the scattering center's magnetic field) was influential in the application of neutron scattering in solid state physics, for which Clifford Shull and others received the Nobel Prize. With Hans Thirring he published an early book on quantum mechanics. He wrote articles on statistics and relativity mechanics in the Handbook of Physics by Geiger / Scheel.

Theodore Holstein (1915–1985) and Morton Hamermesh were among his doctoral students in the United States .

Fonts

  • with Hans Thirring: The elements of the new quantum mechanics, London, Methuen 1932

literature

  • Paul Urban: In memoriam Otto Halpern, Acta Physica Austriaca, 55, 1983, 1-6
  • Havey Hall: Otto Halpern, Physics Today, July 1983

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ These included the historians Carl Patsch and Heinrich von Srbik and the paleontologist Kurt Ehrenberg , assistant to the founder of the clique Othenio Abel . The physicist Adolf Smekal was also firmly against Halpern's habilitation - Halpern was known for expressing professional criticism without looking at the person.
  2. ^ Halpern, Johnson Magnetic scattering of slow neutrons , Phys. Rev., Volume 52, 1937, 52 doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.52.52
personal data
SURNAME Halpern, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 1982
Place of death London