Walter Wessel (physicist)

Walter Wessel (born February 28, 1900 in Wolfenbüttel ; † November 15, 1984 ibid) was a German theoretical physicist and professor at Heidelberg University .

Life

Wessel, the son of a publisher bookseller, visited the Great School in Wolfenbüttel (where Hans Friedrich Geitel and Julius Elster among his physics teachers) and studied from 1918 chemistry, physics and botany in Braunschweig, Jena and from 1921 in Munich , where he at Wilhelm Vienna studied and became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld . He was one of the physicists who, like Werner Heisenberg , went to Göttingen with Sommerfeld, the center of evolving quantum mechanics. There he received his doctorate under Max Born in 1924 . However, he himself dealt with physical chemistry (theory of the surface charge of organic electrolytes). He became Georg Joos' assistant in Jena, where he dealt with Schrödinger wave mechanics (Habilitation 1929: On the question of wave groups in atomic mechanics).

In 1930 he went to the University of Coimbra in Portugal as a professor to represent the new quantum mechanics. There he dealt with quantum electrodynamics and self-interaction of charged particles. When the salaries were not paid due to the financial crisis in Portugal, he went back to Jena with a teaching position for quantum mechanics in 1933. He became senior assistant, in 1936 an adjunct professor and in 1939 an adjunct professor in Jena. There he dealt with the theory of alternating current circuits and antennas, which earned him the recognition of Sommerfeld and led him to his appointment to Graz (associate professor and director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1940). During the Second World War he was a meteorologist in the Air Force (Athens, Crete, Peenemünde and Berlin).

After the war he had to leave Graz (as a foreigner classified as undesirable by the occupying powers, although he had no political prejudice from the time of National Socialism). He went to Walter Bothe in Heidelberg, where he was involved in rebuilding physics (substitute professor in 1946). Sometimes he also worked in Karlsruhe. In 1947 he went to the USA because he couldn't get a professorship in Heidelberg at the time. He was a research fellow at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and from 1954 professor at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton. and did not return until 1956 as a full professor for theoretical physics in Heidelberg and director of the Institute for Mechanics. 1957/58 he was dean of Math.-Naturwiss. Faculty. In 1968 he was relieved of his chair in Heidelberg and continued to stand in for his chair until the end of 1969.

After the war, he mainly dealt with quantum field theory and here the problem of determining the lepton masses (at that time especially the electron), going unorthodox ways (structure of the mass operator in relativistic quantum mechanics, transferring the treatment of the self-interaction of charged particles from the classical to the quantum mechanical Area, partly with Fritz Bopp , Helmut Hönl ).

Fonts

Little Quantum Mechanics, Freiburg: Herder 1949, Mosbach: Physik-Verlag 1966

literature

Berthold Stech , Obituary in Physikalische Blätter, Volume 41, 1985, No. 3, pp. 78/79, doi : 10.1002 / phbl.19850410312
Dagmar Drüll (Ed.): Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1933-1986, Springer 2009

Individual evidence

↑ In 1946 he published for the FIAT Reviews of German Science (the Allied project for the presentation of research advances in Germany during the war) in Walter Wessel: Zur Theorie des Elektrons. In: Journal for Nature Research . 1, 1946, pp. 622-635 ( online ).
↑ See also the information in Wessel, On the Interpretation and Generalization of Dirac's Theory of the Electron, Phys. Rev. 91, 1953, 986, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.91.986
↑ Paul Dirac , who developed himself in the 1940s through Richard Feynman , Julian Schwinger , Freeman Dyson and others, also pursued such approaches . a. was skeptical of the formulation of quantum electrodynamics
^ Wessel, On Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and the Mass Operator, Phys. Rev., Volume 83, 1951, 1031, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.83.1031
↑ Walter Wessel: Infinite representations of the Lorentz transformation and the mass problem. In: Journal of Nature Research A . 3, 1948, pp. 559-563 ( online ).

personal data
SURNAME	Wessel, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German theoretical physicist and professor at Heidelberg University
DATE OF BIRTH	February 28, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH	Wolfenbüttel
DATE OF DEATH	November 15, 1984
Place of death	Wolfenbüttel

[1] In 1946 he published for the FIAT Reviews of German Science (the Allied project for the presentation of research advances in Germany during the war) in Walter Wessel: Zur Theorie des Elektrons. In: Journal for Nature Research . 1, 1946, pp. 622-635 ( online ).

[2] See also the information in Wessel, On the Interpretation and Generalization of Dirac's Theory of the Electron, Phys. Rev. 91, 1953, 986, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.91.986

[3] Paul Dirac , who developed himself in the 1940s through Richard Feynman , Julian Schwinger , Freeman Dyson and others, also pursued such approaches . a. was skeptical of the formulation of quantum electrodynamics

[4] Wessel, On Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and the Mass Operator, Phys. Rev., Volume 83, 1951, 1031, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.83.1031

[5] Walter Wessel: Infinite representations of the Lorentz transformation and the mass problem. In: Journal of Nature Research A . 3, 1948, pp. 559-563 ( online ).