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Reiner Kümmel (born July 9, 1939 in Fulda ) is a German physicist specializing in solid-state physics and economic physics .

Scientific career

Reiner Kümmel studied physics and mathematics at the TH Darmstadt from 1959–64 . He obtained his doctorate in superconductivity at the University of Frankfurt in 1968 and completed his habilitation there in 1973 in theoretical physics. During his doctorate and postdoctoral studies, he also did research abroad, such as from 1965 to 1967 as a research assistant under the two-time Nobel Prize in Physics John Bardeen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . From 1970 to 1972 he worked in Colombia at the Universidad del Valle in Cali , where he took part in the development of a master’s program in physics through a DAAD scholarship, which was used to develop young academics. During this time he immersed himself in thermodynamics .

From 1974 he took over a professorship for theoretical physics in Würzburg , which was also characterized by numerous research and visiting lecturers abroad. In the 1970s, the time of the energy crisis, his interest in economics as a second mainstay began to grow. A lively exchange developed with Wolfgang Eichhorn , who worked as an economist (and mathematician) at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) . His main research interests in physics were the theory of inhomogeneous superconductors and mesoscopic heterocontacts. The economic interest focused on energy use and emission reduction. From 1996 to 1998 Reiner Kümmel chaired the Energy Working Group of the German Physical Society . He retired in October 2004. Since then he has been connected to the university with a teaching position for the lecture “Thermodynamics and Economics”.

In his book The Second Law of Economics , he discusses the influence of energy conservation and entropy on prosperity and adds "the important scientific component of energy, without which a modern economy cannot be understood" to the production theory of economics To alleviate the need to grow .

Fonts

• Reiner Kümmel, Dietmar Lindenberger, Wolfgang Eichhorn: Energy, economic growth and technical progress. In: Phys. Leaves. Vol. 53, 1997, pp. 869-875.
• Arne Jacobs, Reiner Kümmel: Dynamics of conversion of supercurrents into normal currents and vice versa. In: Phys. Rev. B, Vol. 64, No. 10, 2001.
• Jürgen Grahl, Reiner Kümmel: The hole in the barrel - energy slaves, jobs and the alleviation of the pressure to grow. (PDF; 452 kB) In: Sustainable Growth: Science and Environment Interdisciplinary, Vol. 13, 2009, pp. 195–212.
• Reiner Kümmel: The Second Law of Economics: Energy, Entropy, and the Origins of Wealth. Springer, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-1-441-99364-9 .
• Reiner Kümmel, Dietmar Lindenberger, Niko Paech: Energy, Entropy, Creativity: What drives and slows economic growth , Springer Spectrum, 2018, ISBN 978-3-662-57857-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Reiner Kümmel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Scientific career on the institute's website. uni-wuerzburg.de, October 3, 2013, archived from the original on January 9, 2014 . 
2. ↑ Energy Working Group ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Website of the DPG . 
3. ↑ R. Kümmel: Growth, Work, Energy. (PDF; 985 kB)
4. ↑ Seminar announcement summer semester 2015
5. ↑ Physics Today, December 2011, excerpt from springer.com
6. ↑ Jürgen Mimkes : The Second Law of Economics . Review in the Physik Journal, Vol. 11 (2012), No. 6, p. 67
7. ↑ Jürgen Grahl, Reiner Kümmel: The hole in the barrel - energy slaves, jobs and the alleviation of the pressure to grow. (PDF; 452 kB) In: Sustainable Growth: Science and Environment Interdisciplinary, Vol. 13, 2009, pp. 195–212.