Richard Becker (physicist)

Richard Becker (born December 3, 1887 in Hamburg , † March 16, 1955 in Bad Schwalbach ) was a German physicist .

Life

Richard Becker grew up in Hamburg as the son of the businessman Conrad Becker and his wife Agnes, nee. Birch, up. After graduation in 1906 he studied zoology and a PhD in 1910 in Freiburg (doctoral thesis on Diptera - larvae in August Weismann ). After that he was so enthusiastic about lectures by Arnold Sommerfeld that he studied physics . He completed his studies with the state examination for higher teaching qualifications.

After a short assistantship, among others with Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, he went to the explosives industry in 1913 and later to the research laboratory of the incandescent lamp manufacturer Osram . In 1922 , Becker completed his habilitation at the University of Berlin under Max Planck , but not without difficulty, because the fundamental importance of his theory of shock waves and detonation did not receive due attention until about 20 years later. In 1926 he was appointed full professor at the newly established chair for theoretical physics at the Technical University of Berlin .

Presumably after an intrigue by a colleague from the defense technology faculty in Berlin, Becker moved to Göttingen in 1936 , where he took over the professorship from Max Born , who, as a Jew, had been driven out of Germany by the Nazis in their racial madness. Due to the circumstances, it had taken a great deal of persuasion to persuade Becker to make the change. A year earlier, Becker, together with Werner Heisenberg and Peter Debye, had been considered by the specialist representatives in the list proposal for the successor to Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. However, under the influence of the National Socialists, the lecturers at the university opposed this vote and appointed Wilhelm Müller, a representative of the so-called German physics loyal to the regime, and thus the “worst conceivable successor” (according to Arnold Sommerfeld).

After the war, Becker made particular efforts to re-establish contact with his colleagues and students who had emigrated abroad. In 1951 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1954 he became chairman of the German Physical Society . From 1952 to 1955 he was President of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen .

In research, Becker achieved important results not only on shock waves and detonation, but also on the plasticity of metals and on the theory of ferromagnetism and superconductivity . In particular, his theory of nucleation, together with Werner Döring , is an essential and much-cited contribution to statistical physics .

Becker enjoyed understanding physical processes from the ground up. If he had understood physical phenomena and mechanisms clearly and vividly, then he was happy and pursued other physical questions.

In addition to his diverse scientific contributions, Becker made a name for himself as an excellent teacher of theoretical physics. As in research, he strived for the greatest possible clarity and descriptiveness in his lectures, lectures and scientific discussions and never stopped at a formal mathematical treatment.

His textbooks on the theory of heat and the theory of electricity were very popular in physics studies for decades.

His students

As a professor in Berlin and Göttingen, Becker had a lasting influence on theoretical physics not only in Germany; The later Nobel Prize winners Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize 1963), Wolfgang Paul (Nobel Prize 1989), Hans Georg Dehmelt (Nobel Prize 1989) and Herbert Krömer (Nobel Prize 2000) received important impulses from him in the early stages of their scientific development . Other well-known physicists of the 20th century, such as Werner Döring , Walter Boas , Wilhelm Brenig , Burkhard Heim , Friedrich Georg Houtermans , Gustav Richter , Fred Kocks (* 1929), Günther Leibfried , Günther Ludwig , Hans Ehrenberg , Rudolf Schulten and Georg Heinrich Thiessen were students of Richard Becker in the narrower or broader sense.

Selected Works

• Theory of heat , Berlin, Springer 1955.
• Theory of Electricity , 2 volumes
  • Volume 1: Introduction to Maxwell's Theory
  • Volume 2: electron theory

This two-volume book, the Abraham-Becker , was so successful that it was later expanded and modernized as Becker-Sauter into a three-volume work:

• Richard Becker, Fritz Sauter : Theory of Electricity , Stuttgart, Teubner 1973, 1970, 1969, ISBN 3-519-23006-2
  • Volume 1, Introduction to Maxwell's Theory, Electron Theory , Theory of Relativity , 1973
  • Volume 2, Introduction to the Quantum Theory of Atoms and Radiation , 1970
  • Volume 3, Electrodynamics of Matter , 1969
• Kínetic treatment of nucleation in supersaturated vapors (zsm. With W. Döring), in: Annalen der Physik 24, 719 (1935)

literature

• W. Döring: Richard Becker 60 years , in: Physikalische Blätter 3, 393 (1947).
• K. Schönhammer, scholar in Göttingen. The Göttingen Academy of Sciences in Portraits and Appreciations , Ed .: K. Arndt et al., Wallstein Verlag, 2001, Volume 2, p. 468.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to the memoirs of Wilhelm Westphal, 68 years as a physicist in Berlin, Physikalische Blätter, June 1972, p. 264, the Ministry considered a theoretician at the TH Charlottenburg to be superfluous.
2. ↑ APS Fellow Archive. Fellows 1951. American Physical Society, accessed December 16, 2015 . 

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Becker in the catalog of the German National Library
• TU Berlin via Richard Becker (photo)
• Göttingen years