Victor Weisskopf

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Victor Weisskopf

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (born September 19, 1908 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † April 22, 2002 in Newton , Massachusetts ) was an Austrian - American physicist .

Life

Weisskopf grew up in Vienna and after graduating from high school Stubenbastei studied physics, first in Vienna, then from 1928 to 1931 at the University of Göttingen under Max Born . Here he wrote an essay with Eugene Wigner on the quantum theory of the line width of atomic spectra . From 1931 to 1932 he worked successively in Leipzig with Werner Heisenberg , in Berlin with Erwin Schrödinger , in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr and in Cambridge with Paul Dirac , until in 1933 he became Wolfgang Pauli's assistant in Zurich for two years . Here and from 1936 with Niels Bohr he made important early investigations into quantum electrodynamics (QED). Weisskopf had to emigrate to the USA in 1937 because of his Jewish origins .

During the Second World War , he took part in the US atomic bomb program ( Manhattan Project ) at the request of Robert Oppenheimer . He stood in the midst of the conflict between the development of a weapon of mass destruction on the one hand and the fear of an anticipation in the development of the atomic bomb by Germany on the other. His scruples made him co-founder of the Federation of Atomic Scientists in 1944 and he advocated the civil use of nuclear energy . On July 16, 1945, he witnessed the first atomic bomb test . This had a lasting impact on him and he decided not to participate in the development of weapons anymore.

Victor Weisskopf, born in Copenhagen in 1963

After the war he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for which he worked until his death.

With James Bruce French (1921–2002) he made a correct calculation of the Lamb shift at the end of the 1940s, at that time the first exact touchstone of quantum electrodynamics. He is known for his many contributions to theoretical nuclear physics , particularly nuclear reactions , often in collaboration with Herman Feshbach . His textbook with John Blatt has long been considered the standard work of theoretical nuclear physics. In the 1970s he was involved in the development of the "MIT-Bag" model of quarks bound in hadrons .

Weisskopf was known for his great physical intuition, which he also demonstrates in several educational essays and books.

From 1961 to 1965 Weisskopf was director of the European Research Center CERN in Geneva .

Awards

Göttingen memorial plaque for Victor Weisskopf

membership

In 1948 Weisskopf was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1952 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and since 1966 of the American Philosophical Society . In 1962 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In 1974 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In 1975 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Fonts

  • with John M. Blatt : Theoretical nuclear physics. Wiley et al. a., New York NY 1952.
  • Knowledge and Wonder. The Natural World as Man knows it. (= Science Study Series. S 31, ZDB ID 919775-8 ). Anchor, Garden City NY 1962, (In German: Das Wunder des Wissens. Von der Universität der Naturwissenschaften (= Nature and Knowledge. W 30/31, ZDB -ID 599889-x ). Desch, Munich et al. 1964), (popular ).
  • Physics in the Twentieth Century. Selected essays. MIT Press , Cambridge MA et al. a. 1972, ISBN 0-262-23056-9 .
  • with Kurt Gottfried : Concepts in particle physics. 2 volumes. Clarendon Press et al. a., Oxford 1984-1986, ISBN 0-19-503392-2 (Vol. 1), ISBN 0-19-503393-0 (Vol. 2).
  • The Joy of Insight. Passions of a Physicist. Basic Books, New York NY u. a. 1991, ISBN 0-465-03678-3 (In German: Mein Leben. A physicist, contemporary witness and humanist remembers our century. Scherz, Bern et al. 1991, ISBN 3-502-18840-8 ).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Calculation of the natural line width based on Dirac's light theory. In: Journal of Physics . Vol. 63, No. 1/2, 1930, pp. 54-73, doi: 10.1007 / BF01336768 .
  2. ↑ About the self-energy of the electron. In: Journal of Physics. Vol. 89, No. 1/2, 1934, pp. 27–39, doi: 10.1007 / BF01333228 , (Correction: Correction to the work: About the self-energy of the electron. In: Zeitschrift für Physik. Vol. 90, No. 11/12, pp. 817-818, doi: 10.1007 / BF01340744 ); On the self energy and the electromagnetic field of the electron. In: Physical Review . Vol. 56, No. 1, 1939, pp. 72-85, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRev.56.72 .
  3. ↑ The electromagnetic shift of energy levels. In: Physical Review. Vol. 75, No. 8, 1949, 1240-1248, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRev . 75.1240 . The calculation was carried out in 1948 in the QED formulation of the 1930s. As Weisskopf later noted with regret, he delayed publication because he wanted to compare the work of Feynman and Schwinger , who calculated the effect with their new QED methods. Norman Kroll and Willis Lamb came before him with the same result.
  4. ↑ z. B. optical model in Feshbach, CE Porter, Weisskopf Model for nuclear reactions with neutrons. In: Physical Review. Vol. 96, No. 2, 1954, pp. 448-464, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRev.96.448 .
  5. ↑ with Alan Chodos, Robert L. Jaffe, Kenneth Johnson , Charles B. Thorn: New extended model of hadrons. In: Physical Review. D. Vol. 9, No. 12, 1974, pp. 3471-3495, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevD.9.3471 .
  6. ↑ For example his book with Gottfried, which emerged from Cern lectures, or the series of articles "In search for simplicity" in the American Journal of Physics 1985/1986. In one of these articles he calculated z. B. the maximum height of mountains from elementary physical constants.
  7. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
  8. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved October 11, 2015
  9. ↑ Member History: Victor F. Weisskopf. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 15, 2018 .
  10. ^ Herbert Walther : Victor Frederick Weisskopf (obituary) . In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . 2002, p. 336–338 ( online [PDF; accessed on May 16, 2017]).
  11. ↑ Member entry of Victor F. Weisskopf at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 11, 2016.
  12. ↑ Ernst Peter Fischer : Mozart and quantum mechanics belong together - as education. In: Die Welt , January 9, 2006.


personal data
SURNAME Weisskopf, Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weisskopf, Victor Frederick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 19, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 2002
Place of death Newton (Massachusetts)