Ronald GJ Fraser

Ronald George Juta Fraser (born March 11, 1899 in Strathpeffer , † September 8, 1985 in New Zealand ) was a British physicist.

Life

Fraser served with the Gordon Highlanders and the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Aberdeen in 1926 (Some aspects of the theory of space quantization in a magnetic field). Fraser was a specialist in molecular beams , about which he published a book in 1931. In the 1920s he was a post-doctoral student at Otto Stern in Hamburg, the pioneer of the molecular beam method, and met Isidor Isaac Rabi there . He did research in the 1930s at Imperial Chemical Industries and in Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory (then headed by Ernest Rutherford ). After the Second World War he was responsible for physical research in the British occupation zone and promoted the Göttingen physicists. For example, he overlooked the Allied ban on research in applied nuclear physics and made it possible for Hans Kopfermann to complete the betatron he had begun at Siemens during the war (he also ensured that it was brought from Erlangen to Göttingen against the will of the Americans). He promoted the establishment of a German Physical Society in the British Zone and was significantly involved in the re-establishment of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Braunschweig (in 1946 he offered the site of the former German Research Institute for Aviation ). He invited foreign guests from England, Amsterdam and Scandinavia to the autumn conference of the new Physical Society in Göttingen in 1947. Soon afterwards (late 1948) he became liaison officer of the ICSU to UNESCO in Paris.

He was the first to point out that the splitting into two rays in the Stern-Gerlach experiment was due to the spin of the electrons (since the ground state of the silver atoms used, for example, had zero angular momentum). In the original publications and before Fraser's 1927 paper, electron spin was not mentioned.

In The Hague he was closely involved in the organization of the International Geophysical Years 1957 and 1958. Later he was at the Oceanographic Institute in Wellington, New Zealand.

In 1949 he became an honorary member of the German Physical Society

Fonts

• Molecular Rays, Cambridge University Press 1931
• Molecular Beams, London 1937 (2nd edition of Molecular Rays)
• Once Round the Sun: The Story of the International Geophysical Year, 1961
• Planet Earth, London 1961
  • German translation: Planet Erde, Bielefeld 1962
• The Habitable Earth, Basic Books 1964
• Understanding the Earth, Penguin 194
• Published in: Oceanography of the South Pacific, 1972

literature

• University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Alumnus Association: Aberdeen University review. : volume 51, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1985, p. 386.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ronald GJ Fraser in the WorldCat bibliographic database

References and comments

1. ↑ Date of birth according to Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, Roll of Service, Great War
2. ↑ Correspondence from 1928 to 1976 is kept in the Rabi Papers , Rabi Papers
3. ↑ Gerhard Rammer, Göttingen physicist after 1945. The effect of collegial networks, Göttinger Jahrbuch, Volume 51, 2003, p. 91
4. ↑ Prof. Roy. Soc. A, Volume 114, 1927, p. 212 and in Molecular Beams , 1937, p. 33. Quoted from Peter Toennies et al. a. Otto Stern (1888-1969): The founding father of experimental atomic physics, Annalen der Physik, Volume 523, 2011, 1045-1070
5. ↑ Bretislav Friedrich, Dudley Herschbach, Stern and Gerlach: how a bad cigar helped reorient atomic physics, Physics Today, December 2003, p. 57, pdf