Russell McCormmach

Russell Keith McCormmach (* 1933 ) is an American historian of physics.

McCormmach grew up in Walla Walla and studied physics at Washington State College (bachelor's degree in 1955) and politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar (bachelor's degree in 1959). He then worked as an electronics engineer at Bell Laboratories . In 1967 he received his PhD in history of science from the Case Institute of Technology under Martin J. Klein . He was then professor of the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University (until 1983), later at the University of Oregon . He has now retired there.

McCormmach dealt with German physics of the 19th and 20th centuries. His book Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist , the fictional memories of an older German physics professor (called Viktor Jacob), who was facing the revolutionary upheaval in physics (relativity theory, quantum theory and atomic physics) at the beginning of the 20th century, and at the same time the collapse of the German Empire in the First World War. The figure is partly based on Paul Drude , who died of suicide in 1906 and whose Jacob remembers as a friend in the book.

He wrote a biography of Henry Cavendish with his wife Christa Jungnickel and together with her a history of German theoretical physics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His biography of the English naturalist John Michell , whose letters he also edited, was published in 2012.

He received the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize in 1987 , the American Philosophical Society's John Frederick Lewis Award, and the American Physical Society's 2010 Abraham Pais Prize .

In 1969 he founded the journal Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (now Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences ), which he edited for ten years.

Fonts

• Night thoughts of a classical physicist . Insel 1984, ISBN 978-3458141341 . (Original English: Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist . Harvard University Press 1982, ISBN 978-0674624603 )
• With Christa Jungnickel: Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein . Two volumes, University of Chicago Press 1986, 1990. Vol. I The torch of mathematics 1800-1870 , Vol. II The now mighty theoretical physics 1870-1925 , ISBN 978-0226415857
• With Christa Jungnickel: Cavendish . American Philosophical Society 1996
• With Christa Jungnickel: Cavendish - the Experimental Life , Bucknell University Press 1999, ISBN 978-0838754450
• Speculative Truth: Henry Cavendish, Natural Philosophy, and the Rise of Modern Theoretical Science . Oxford University Press 2004, ISBN 978-0195160048
• Weighing the World. The Reverend John Michell of Thornhill . Springer, Dordrecht-Heidelberg-London-New York 2012, ISBN 978-9400720213 , e- ISBN 978-9400720220

Web links

• Laudation for the Abraham Pais Prize