Otto Lührs

Otto Lührs (born October 10, 1939 in Schwaförden ) is a German physicist and artist .

Career

Otto Lührs did an apprenticeship as an electrician in Diepholz and then worked as a telecommunications tradesman at the Deutsche Bundespost in Bremen . After graduating from high school in 1967 at the evening grammar school in Bremen , since 1988 adult school in Bremen , he studied electrical engineering and physics at the Technical University of Berlin . In addition, he studied cultural work at the Berlin University of the Arts . In addition to his studies, Lührs has been working on the then new light emitting diodes since 1973 . He mounted the light-emitting diodes on a disk that he let rotate quickly. The light-emitting diodes were controlled by an electronic circuit. This is how decorative light objects were created. He called the process rotography and showed corresponding objects at Ars Electronica | in 1980 in Linz and at other art exhibitions, sometimes under the pseudonym Otto Frühling . From 1982 to 2004, Lührs headed the Department of Natural Science Fundamentals of Technology at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin and was in charge of setting up the Science Center Spectrum . At the instigation of the museum director Günther Gottmann , the Berlin cultural administration sent the physicist Otto Lührs to a 14-day study visit to the Exploratorium in San Francisco in February 1982 . In this science center set up by Frank Oppenheimer , he made sketches and photos and observed the behavior of the audience. He returned to Berlin with ten suggestions for exhibits and immediately began creating hands-on exhibits (interactive exhibits that could be touched and tried out), which could be presented to the public in the same year. The opening took place on December 14, 1982 in the rooms of the friends' association of the future technology museum in Berlin's Urania . This marked the beginning of the initial steps towards setting up the Science Center Spectrum as the first German museum facility with interactive experiment stations from the fields of science and technology, which is visited by 200,000 people annually. For this achievement he was honored in 2009 with the Georg Kerschensteiner Prize of the German Physical Society , which is awarded for outstanding contributions to didactics and school physics. In 2012 he was also honored with the Cross of Merit on Ribbon for his longstanding commitment to science education.

In addition, he worked as a consultant for phæno in Wolfsburg and was chairman of the teacher training initiative Science on Stage Germany for many years .

Honors

• 2009: Georg Kerschensteiner Prize of the German Physical Society
• 2012: Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany

Web links

• Author portrait (PDF; 119 kB) from the Tessloff publishing house
• Members of the board of Science on Stage Deutschland e. V.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Catalog Ars Electronica as part of the international Bruckner Festival 1980, p. 114.
2. ↑ Science on Stage: The physicist Otto Lührs and the rotography experiment . Retrieved January 28, 2016.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} DPG: Prize Winners 2009 - Georg Kerschensteiner Prize 2009
4. ↑ Award ceremony on the Day of German Unity , October 4, 2012.

literature

• Sieghard Scheffczyk: De Englanner hett seggt ... homage to the physicist and artist Prof. Otto Lührs. In: KON TE XIS information publication 70_2019 , pp. 8–10.

Publications (selection)

• with Gerhard Ebel: Urania - an idea, a movement, an institution is 100 years old. In: 100 years of Urania Berlin. Urania Berlin eV, 1988, pp. 15-74.
• Looking and touching, technical museums and their change. In: Culture and Technology. Deutsches Museum München, 3/1992, pp. 49–53.
• Wilhelm Foerster and the founding of Urania . In: Mathias Iven (Ed.): 3 × Foerster . Schibri-Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-928878-29-8 , pp. 56-66 .
• Magnetism (=  what is what? No. 39 ). Tessloff Verlag Nürnberg, 2002, ISBN 3-7886-0279-1 .
• Max Wilhelm Meyer - a pioneer of science journalism . In: Mathias Iven (ed.): Be not just, but kind . Schibri-Verlag, 1996, ISBN 3-928878-45-X , p. 33-44 .
• For the year of the humanities . In: Technischer Jugendfreizeit- und Bildungsverein eV (Hrsg.): Contexis . No. 22 , 2007, p. 2 ( tjfbg.de [PDF]).
• Science Center - How did it all start? In: Wissenschaft im Dialog gGmbH (Ed.): Forum Wissenschaftskommunikation, Symposium 23. – 25. September 2008 Bremerhaven . 2008, p. 6–7 ( Wissenschaft-im-dialog.de [PDF]).
• Technology museum and science center. A look at the structure after 25 years . In: Museumsjournal Berlin . No. 1 , 2008, p. 16-17 .
• Touching welcome! In: Physics Journal . tape 8 , no. 8/9 , 2009, pp. 75-78 ( pro-physik.de [PDF]).
• Urania Myth and Reality. In: 125 years of Urania Berlin. Westkreuz-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-943755-14-5 , pp. 19-66.
• The way to the spectrum. In: Science and the public. Eugen Goldstein Colloquium, Urania Berlin April 19, 2013. Westkreuz-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-944836-11-9 .
• The Urania in National Socialism. In: Science and the Public, Eugen Goldstein Colloquium, Urania Berlin April 19, 2013. Westkreuz-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-944836-11-9 .