Stefan Meyer (physicist)

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Bunsentagung Münster 1932, Stefan Meyer is 2nd from the right

Stefan Meyer (born April 27, 1872 in Vienna , † December 29, 1949 in Bad Ischl ) was an Austrian physicist and pioneer in research into radioactivity . He taught at the University of Vienna as a professor of physics, played a key role in the establishment and management of the Vienna Institute for Radium Research and in the international Radium Standard Commission.

Life

Meyer, brother of the chemist Hans Leopold Meyer (1871–1942), graduated from the Horn high school and studied mathematics , physics and chemistry in Vienna from 1892 . In 1896 he received his doctorate as Dr. phil. and then continued his studies in Leipzig and at the Technical University of Vienna . In 1897 he became an assistant to Ludwig Boltzmann .

Through a contact with the Braunschweig chemist Friedrich Giesel , he came into possession of small samples of radium ( pitch screen residues ). With the help of measurements and results on these samples, the first work of the Vienna Physics Institute on the investigation of radioactivity was published in 1899, with which he completed his habilitation as a private lecturer in physics at the University of Vienna in 1900 . Stefan Meyer, an enthusiastic musician, was a lecturer in acoustics at the Conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde from 1902 to 1911 .

After Ludwig Boltzmann's death in 1906, he briefly took over the management of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 1907 he became an assistant to Franz-Serafin Exner and in 1908 received the title of associate professor at the University of Vienna. 1908-10, he and Exner played a key role in the planning of the Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , which was to be newly founded on the basis of a foundation by court advocate Karl Kupelwieser . In 1915 he became a full professor and in 1920 head of the Institute for Radium Research. In 1910 he was appointed secretary by the constituent assembly of the international radium standards commission (President Ernest Rutherford ) in Brussels , which had the goal of creating internationally comparable "radium standards" for radioactive preparations. In 1912 his assistant and student Victor Franz Hess discovered cosmic radiation, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936 . In 1913, George de Hevesy (Nobel Prize 1943) and Friedrich Adolf Paneth carried out their first experiments on the radioactive tracer method at the Institute for Radium Research. In 1921 he became a corresponding member and in 1932 a full member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna . In 1937 he was appointed President of the International Radium Standards Commission.

In 1938 Stefan Meyer was forcibly retired because of his Jewish descent. He resigned from the Academy of Sciences on November 24, 1938 in order to spare it difficulties and to forestall an expulsion. Thanks to his good relationships, he was able to survive the Nazi era in Bad Ischl unmolested. 1946-47 he worked as an honorary professor at the University of Vienna and as head of the Institute for Radium Research, before he retired in 1947. He died on December 29, 1949 in Bad Ischl.

meaning

Stefan Meyer was one of the most important Viennese physicists of his time. He is one of the pioneers in research into radioactivity; the institute in Vienna he headed , together with the institutes in Paris and Cambridge headed by the couple Marie and Pierre Curie and Ernest Rutherford , was one of the world's most renowned research centers on radioactivity at the time. Access to radium sources from the Bohemian mines in Sankt Joachimsthal , with which the institutes in Paris and Cambridge were also supplied, came to the rescue . One of Meyer's main achievements is the realization that radium radiation is particle radiation. He was able to prove that polonium is not a stable element, and he took the first steps to determine the age with the help of radioactive elements. In 1937, Stefan Meyer determined the age of the sun to be around 4½ billion years.

Meyer was never proposed at the Nobel Prize in Physics from 1901 to 1929, but his own proposals were very successful: he proposed 12 physicists, 10 of whom actually became Nobel Prize winners (4 as early as the year Meyer proposed them). This could be an additional indication of Meyer's good international network.

Honor

The Stefan Meyer Institute for Subatomic Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (SMI, Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Vienna) honors the name of the longstanding board member of the Institute for Radium Research. It was created in 2004 through the renaming of the Institute for Medium Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Fonts (selection)

  • Handbook of radioactivity . 1916 (with E. Schweidler).
  • On the genesis of the chemical elements . 1947.
  • The prehistory, the foundation and the 1st decade of the Institute for Radium Research . 1950.
  • On the history of the discovery of the nature of the Becquerel rays . In: The natural sciences . Vol. 36, 1949.

swell

  • Wolfgang Reiter: Stefan Meyer: Pioneer in Radioactivity . In: Physics in Perspective . Vol. 3 (1), 106-127
  • Stefan Sienell, Christine Ottner: The archive of the institute for radium research . In: Anzeiger der math.-nat. Class of the OeAW . II 140, 2004, pp. 11-53, especially pp. 23-33
  • Berta Karlik, Erich Schmid: Franz Serafin Exner and his circle. A contribution to the history of physics in Austria . Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1982.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer : The Academy of Sciences in Vienna in the Third Reich . In: Eduard Seidler u. a. (Ed.): The nation's elite in the Third Reich. The relationship of academies and their scientific environment to National Socialism (= Acta historica Leopoldina ; 22). Halle / Saale 1995, pp. 133–159, there 137.
  2. ^ Franz Stuhlhofer: Do national viewpoints contribute to the awarding of the Nobel Prizes? In: Communications of the Austrian Society for the History of Natural Sciences 6, 1986, pp. 1–10, there 9.
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Stefan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian physicist and pioneer in research into radioactivity
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1949
Place of death Bad Ischl