Richard Goose

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Richard Martin Gans , also Ricardo Gans (born March 7, 1880 in Hamburg , † June 27, 1954 in City Bell near La Plata , Argentina ) was a German physicist .

Life

Richard Gans was one of six children of the Hamburg businessman Martin Philipp Gans and his wife Johanna Juliette Gans, née Behrens.

Gans first studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Hanover, then mathematics and physics at the University of Strasbourg . Jonathan Zenneck , Emil Cohn and the mathematician Heinrich Weber were among his teachers there . 1901 doctorate Gans at the University of Strasbourg with the subject via the induction in rotating conductors Dr. phil. nat., summa cum laude . From 1901 to 1902 he conducted research at the University of Heidelberg as an assistant to Georg Quincke . In 1902 he became an employee of Friedrich Paschen at the University of Tübingen , where he had already studied and where he completed his habilitation in 1903. Among other things, he dealt with the Zeeman effect . From 1903 to 1908 he worked as a private lecturer at the University of Tübingen. Together with Paul Gmelin, he was involved in the development of a precision method for determining absolute magnetic fields, developed etalons (calibrated comparison magnets) for measuring strong magnetic fields and, as a teacher, had dealt with the theory of relativity early on . He also dealt with the magnetization curve, the temperature dependence of the coercive field strength , the magnetization of thin layers and introduced the terms longitudinal and transverse as well as reversible and irreversible permeability .

From 1908 to 1912 he taught at the University of Strasbourg. From 1912 to 1925 he was Professor of Physics at the University of La Plata , Argentina. There he built up the physics institute of the university and became its director. Two of his brothers died in the German army during the First World War .

From 1925 to 1935 Gans was full professor for theoretical physics at the Second Physics Institute of the University of Königsberg . His focus was on the study of magnetism, where he worked both theoretically and experimentally. Nikolai Sergejewitsch Akulow , who set up a school for the study of magnetism in the Soviet Union, Ernst Czerlinsky and Udo Adelsberger were among his students and colleagues in Königsberg . The questions he examined in Königsberg included the investigation of magnetization on a crystalline and molecular (internal stray field) level, localization of hysteresis losses from the magnetization curve, and the influence of elastic (mechanical) stresses on magnetization.

After the National Socialists came to power, he was initially left alone in Argentina because of his services in the First World War.

Due to his Jewish descent, Gans was forced to retire on December 27, 1935 at the age of only 55 due to the Nuremberg race laws .

He then moved to Berlin, where he had received an alternative position as a research assistant at the AEG research institute in Berlin-Reinickendorf. His former assistant Bernhard Mrowka , who had refused to join the Nazi lecturers' association, had also found a new job there. The head of the institute was Carl Ramsauer , who opposed German physics from there . As a result of the race laws, Max von Laue was forced to forbid Gans to participate in colloquia at Berlin University. In 1938 Gans resigned from the German Physical Society together with Emil Cohn , George Jaffé , Leo Graetz , Walter Kaufmann and other Jewish physicists in protest against National Socialist arbitrariness . With the help of friends such as Walther Gerlach , Gans was otherwise largely able to escape persecution by the National Socialists. Gerlach, who played an important role in the Reich Research Council, which gave Gans orders, mentions that Gans had to work hard physically at times at the beginning of the war, but did not lose his humor and interest in physics. After Gans lost his post at the AEG research institute in 1943, he worked in the Dr. Schmellenmeier in Berlin-Lankwitz. This private institute was entrusted with defense technology development contracts and was financed by the Reich Research Council. Gans was involved in the development of a radiation source and an accelerator, the then so-called "Rheotron", better known under the name Betatron . Specialist colleagues had asserted that goose was “indispensable” to the NS authorities in this development project in order to save him from deportation to a concentration camp .

In 1946, after the end of the Second World War , Gans was temporarily allowed to hold the chair of 77-year-old Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich , without having any prospect of his successor.

For personal reasons he gave up the representation after about nine months in order to emigrate to Argentina in 1947, where he had already worked at the Universidad de la Plata around the time of the First World War . From 1947 to 1951 he worked again at the same university. There he became director of the Physics Institute. From 1951 to 1953 he taught at the University of Buenos Aires as a professor of physics. He was a teacher a. a. of the physicist Bernhard Mrowka (1907–1973), who had been his assistant from 1931 to 1934. In Argentina, among other things, he dealt with radio technology.

At the beginning of his professional career, Gans published regular summaries of important international publications in the German biweekly journal Beiblätter zu den Annalen der Physik , which Albert Einstein did in the same journal around the same time . In spring 1905, in issue no. 4, Gans published a summary of an essay by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz from 1904 in which the latter explicitly mentions the Lorentz transformation. Einstein published many reviews of thermodynamics in the same supplementary sheets in the same volume. According to popular opinion and also according to the well-known traditional testimonies from Einstein, he was not familiar with the Lorentz transformation in the preparation of his 1905 work.

One focus of his research was the scattering of light on microscopic suspended particles ( Tyndall effect ), on high-purity gases and liquids, which he researched theoretically (quantum theory) and experimentally, which posed great experimental challenges at the time. In this context, he also examined and refined the theory of Brownian motion by Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski , optical activity , diffusion in liquids, and electro-optical phenomena.

Publications

  • Via induction in rotating ladders ; Strasbourg 1902 (32 pages).
  • "The basic equations of electrodynamics", negotiations of the Natural Science-Medical Association in Heidelberg , New Series, VIII (2), 208-219 (1904). (The essay compares the theories for moving media by H. Hertz, HA Lorentz and E. Cohn.)
  • Introduction to vector analysis with applications to mathematical physics , Leipzig 1905, 6th edition 1929.
  • Introduction to the theory of magnetism , Leipzig / Berlin 1908 (110 pages)
  • Electrostatics and Magnetostatics , 1906, Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences
  • "Older and newer theories of magnetism", The culture of the present (P. Henneberg, ed.), III. Part, 3rd section, 1st volume: Physics , Leipzig / Berlin 1915, 334 - 348.
  • Rudolf H. Weber and Richard Gans, Repertory of Physics , Vol. I: Mechanics and Warmth , Part One: Mechanics, Elasticity, Hydrodynamics and Acoustics , Leipzig / Berlin 1915 (434 pages).
  • “Have we reached the limit of what we can measure? - A contribution to the theory of the molecular movement of measuring instruments ”, writings of the Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft , Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, 7 (5), 177 - 194 (1930).
  • The physics of the last thirty years , speech given at the celebration of the foundation of the Reich on January 18, 1930, Königsberg 1930 (19 pages).
  • Richard Gans and Bernhard Mrowka, contributions to the theory of atomic magnetism , Halle 1934 (86 pages).
  • “Media with a variable refractive index” and “light scattering”, Handbuch der Experimentalphysik (W. Wien and F. Harms , eds.) XIX , Leipzig 1928, pp. 343–406.
  • Richard Gans and Bernhard Mrowka, contribution to perturbation theory in wave mechanics , Halle 1935 (30 pages).

literature

  • Gerlach, Walther:  Gans, Richard Martin. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 64 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Edgar Swinne, "Richard Gans: University Lecturers in Germany and Argentina", Contributions to the History of Natural Sciences and Technology 14 , Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-928577-10-7 .
  • Pedro Waloschek , death rays as lifesavers - factual report from the Third Reich , August 2004, Books on Demand GmbH; P. 33–64: "Richard Gans' and Hans Schmellenmeier's' Rheotron '", ISBN 3-8334-1616-5 .
  • Ignacio Klich (1995) "German and Italian Jewish Scientists in South America - An Introduction", Ibero-American Archives 21 , 1/2, 59 - 66.
  • Ignacio Klich (1995) "Richard Gans, Guido Beck and the Role of German Speaking Jewish Scientists in the Early Days of Argentinia's Nuclear Project", Ibero-American Archives 21 , 1/2, 127-167.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walther Gerlach, article Gans in the NDB
  2. ↑ Richard Gans: HA Lorentz, Electromagnetic processes in a system that moves with an arbitrary speed (less than that of light) (Versl. K. Ak. Van Wet. 12 , pp. 986-1009, 1904) . In: Supplements to the Annals of Physics , Volume 29, 1905, No. 4, pp. 168–170. wikisource
  3. ↑ For example, in Booklet No. 5 of the supplements to the Annals of Physics from 1905, which appeared 14 days later, Einstein contains a whole series of summaries signed with the abbreviation "AE" on pages 235 (twice) , 236, 237 (three times), 238, 240, 242 and 247. There are no summaries written by Einstein in issues 6 to 11 from 1905, only again in issue 12, namely on pages 624 , 629, 635 (twice) and 636.
  4. ^ Pais, Subtle is the Lord, Oxford UP, 1982, p. 133
personal data
SURNAME Goose, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gans, Richard Martin (full name); Goose, Ricardo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1954
Place of death City Bell at La Plata , Argentina