Peter Pringsheim

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Berlin physicist and chemist 1920. Standing from left to right: Walter Grotrian , Wilhelm Westphal , Otto von Baeyer , Peter Pringsheim, Gustav Hertz . Sitting from left to right: Hertha Sponer , Albert Einstein , Ingrid and James Franck , Lise Meitner , Fritz Haber , Otto Hahn

Peter Pringsheim (born March 19, 1881 in Munich , † November 20, 1963 in Antwerp , Belgium ) was a German professor of physics .

Life

Pringsheim came from the extremely wealthy German-Jewish family Pringsheim from Silesia and was the son of the mathematician Alfred Pringsheim (1850-1941) and his wife Hedwig Pringsheim (1855-1942), the daughter of the women's rights activist Hedwig Dohm . Pringsheim's sister, Katia Mann , was the wife of the writer Thomas Mann . He himself was married to Emmeke (also Emilia) Clément since 1923.

Like his father, he embarked on an academic career as a physicist. After graduating from the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich in 1899 , he studied at the University of Munich from 1900 to 1906 and completed his studies with a doctoral thesis in the physics of gas discharges under Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen . After graduation, Peter Pringsheim worked as a post-doctoral student with Eduard Riecke in Göttingen and JJ Thomson in Cambridge, England . Pringsheim received the suggestion from Thomson to deal with the photoelectric behavior of alkali metals . When Pringsheim joined the Physics Institute at the University of Berlin in 1908 under the direction of Heinrich Rubens , he met Robert Wichard Pohl there , who was already working in this field. The result of this collaboration was the textbook Die Photoelectric Phenomena from 1914.

During the visit to a conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Australia , the First World War broke out, which is why Pringsheim was interned in Australia as a German. He had to spend the entire war in an internment camp , was still detained after the end of the war and was not released until 1919. During the internment, Pringsheim was able to read specialist physical literature. He dealt with the field of fluorescence and phosphorescence and, when he returned to Berlin in 1919, brought with him an almost finished book manuscript based solely on a study of literature, which was then published in 1921 under the title Fluorescence and Phosphorescence in the Light of Newer Atomic Theory . His colleague Pohl has now completed his habilitation and in 1920 he was a professor at the University of Göttingen, as did another colleague at the Berlin institute, James Franck . This was to play a special role in Pringsheim's life.

Since Pohl was now in Göttingen, Pringsheim turned exclusively to his new field of work fluorescence and phosphorescence, which he worked on for life. As a result of his research and lectures, he became a planned, so-called extraordinary professor in 1925 and in 1930 personal full professor of physics at the University of Berlin.

His scientific success is reflected in his staff, like

and the PhD students

contrary.

Although baptized as a Protestant, he was like the other members of his family because of his Jewish descent from the Nazis persecuted. In 1933, Peter Pringsheim was first “on leave” and then “retired” on the basis of the law to restore the civil service , which amounted to a professional ban.

Presumably with the help of his Belgian wife, Pringsheim succeeded in getting Auguste Piccard , who was a physics professor at the Belgian Université Libre in Brussels , to accept him into his institute. Here Pringsheim initially worked as a third-party researcher from 1933 to 1937, and from 1937 as Professeur agréé.

After the German troops marched into Belgium, Pringsheim was arrested on the street on May 10, 1940 and finally taken to the French concentration camp of Gurs . His wife Emilia had no information about her husband's whereabouts until the end of the war. With the help of high-ranking political figures, Pringsheim's brother-in-law Thomas Mann succeeded in getting Pringsheim released from the camp on December 6, 1940. Proof of employment at an American university was required for entry into the USA. His former colleague James Franck, now a professor at the University of Chicago , stood up for him, and finally managed to find a third-funded and one-year job at the University of California. Half of his salary was paid by the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars , the other half by Thomas Mann personally.

Before the end of the year, Franck Pringsheim offered a position in Chicago because not all positions were filled due to the war. Pringsheim accepted this offer and worked at the Franck Institute in Chicago until 1944. In 1943 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . Due to the foreseeable end of the war and the imminent resignation in the event of the return of the post holder, Pringsheim accepted a position in industry on September 1, 1944. However, he was fired on July 9, 1946, because the company dissolved its research department, whereupon Franck gave him a job at the state research institute Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. He worked there from 1947 to 1954 and only left when he was 73.

Pringsheim returned to Belgium and lived there with his wife in Antwerp . In 1961 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen .

Publications

Peter Pringsheim has written 138 scientific publications, mainly articles in scientific journals. Particularly noteworthy are the book publications:

  • The photoelectric phenomena . Braunschweig 1914 (with Robert Wichard Pohl)
  • Fluorescence and Phosphorescence in the Light of Newer Atomic Theory . Berlin 1921, 2nd edition 1923, 3rd edition 1928
  • Luminescence of Liquids and Solids and its Practical Applications . New York 1943, Rev. Repr. 1946 (with M. Vogel). (German luminescence of liquids and solid bodies . Corrected and updated German edition. Weinheim 1951 (with M. Vogel))
  • Fluorescence and Phosphorescence . New York 1949

He also wrote handbook articles for the handbook of physics and the manual dictionary of natural sciences .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Annual report from the K. Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich. ZDB ID 12448436 , 1898/99
  2. ↑ APS Fellow Archive. Fellows 1943. American Physical Society, accessed December 11, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Pringsheim, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist in Belgium and the USA
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1963
Place of death Antwerp