Peter Bergmann (physicist)

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Peter Gabriel Bergmann (born March 24, 1915 in Berlin ; † October 19, 2002 in Seattle ) was a German-American theoretical physicist who dealt with general relativity .

Life

Peter Bergmann was the son of Max Bergmann and Emmy Bergmann and attended a Montessori school initiated by his mother in Freiburg im Breisgau .

He studied at the German University in Prague , where he received his doctorate under Philipp Frank in 1936 . He then worked until 1941 as a research assistant to Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on its unified field theories, including 1938 on Kaluza-Klein theories . He then went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania . During World War II he worked on underwater acoustics for the US Navy at Columbia University and the Woods Hole Laboratory. From 1947 he was a professor at Syracuse University , which he remained until his retirement in 1982. After his retirement he worked at New York University . In 1949 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

In 1942 he wrote an introduction to general relativity, which was much used in its time, and established a school of relativity theorists at Syracuse University, formerly one of the few such centers in the United States, alongside Wheeler's school at Princeton University.

In 2002 he and John Archibald Wheeler received the Einstein Prize for Gravitational Physics from the American Physical Society .

In 1979 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the TU Dresden "in recognition of his services to the care and creative development of the legacy left by Albert Einstein and its integration into current theoretical-physical research".

Fonts

  • Introduction to the Theory of Relativity, 1942 (with a preface by Einstein), Dover 1976
  • The Riddle of Gravitation, Dover Publications, 1993
  • Basic Theories of Physics, Prentice Hall, 1951
  • The Special Theory of Relativity, in S. Flügge (editor) Handbuch der Physik , Vol. 4, 1962, Springer Verlag
  • The General Theory of Relativity, in S. Flügge (editor) Handbuch der Physik , Vol. 4, 1962, Springer Verlag
  • Editor with Peter Aichelburg , Roman Sexl : Albert Einstein- His Influence on Physics, Philosophy and Politics, Vieweg, 1979

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Montessori pedagogy ... and what will “you” become with it later? on the website of the Montessori School Mühlheim
  2. ↑ Honorary doctorates from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences ( Memento from January 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) of the TU Dresden.
personal data
SURNAME Bergmann, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bergmann, Peter Gabriel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 2002
Place of death Seattle