Walter Elsasser

Walter Elsasser, in London in 1934

Walter Maurice Elsasser (born March 20, 1904 in Mannheim ; †  October 14, 1991 in Baltimore , Maryland , USA ) was a German-American physicist .

Elsasser studied in Heidelberg ( Philipp Lenard ), Munich ( Werner Heisenberg ) and Göttingen ( James Franck and Max Born , in which he in 1927 with a thesis on the electron scattering by a hydrogen atom doctorate ).

Elsasser then worked for one semester in 1927 as assistant to Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden . However, due to Ehrenfest's psychological problems, the collaboration turned out to be so difficult that he soon retired to Switzerland (1928 assistant at the ETH Zurich ) and Germany, where he worked for Max von Laue . From 1928 to 1930 he was an assistant at the TH Berlin . In 1929 he was invited to the newly established Physics Institute in Kharkov as a technical assistant , but had to return to Germany after six months due to hepatitis . From 1930 to 1933 he was at the University of Frankfurt am Main and from 1933 to 1936 in Paris at the Institut Henri Poincaré .

In 1936, Elsasser went to Caltech in the USA because he was no longer able to work in Germany due to his Jewish descent . He worked there with meteorology and was in 1941 at the Meteorological Observatory of Harvard University . In the Second World War he was from 1942 at the laboratories of the US Army Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth. After the war he was at the RCA laboratories . In 1947 he became an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1950 Professor at the University of Utah . In 1956 he became Professor at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography , 1960 at the University of California, San Diego and 1962 Professor of Geophysics at Princeton University . In 1968 he became research professor of geophysics at the University of Maryland at the Institute for Hydrodynamics and Applied Mathematics and in 1975 adjunct professor of geophysics at Johns Hopkins University , which he remained until his death.

Elsasser is considered the father of the theory of geodynamos , which he published in 1939. Here he postulated that the earth's magnetic field is maintained by eddy currents within the liquid core of the earth .

For a long time he also worked on biological problems and promoted an understanding of the connection between life and matter .

Since 1957 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and since 1973 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1987 he received the National Medal of Science .

Works

• Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age , New York, Science History Publications 1978
• The role of individuality in biological theory , 1970

Web links

Commons : Walter Elsasser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography at the APS
• Member Directory: Walter M. Elsasser. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 9, 2015 (Biographical Memoir by Harry Rubin).