Werner Reichardt

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Werner Reichardt, 1982

Werner Ernst Reichardt (born January 30, 1924 in Berlin ; † September 11, 1992 in Tübingen ) was a German physicist , biologist and co-founder of biocybernetics .

Life

Werner Reichardt already worked as a student in Hans Erich Hollmann's private laboratory , where he became familiar with the ultra-short wave technology he had developed . Because of his knowledge, he was drafted into the Air Force as a radio measurement technician in 1939. There he came into contact with opponents of the regime and subsequently established a secret radio link with the Western Allies. Shortly before the end of the war, the group was blown up and Reichardt was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death, but was able to flee from the execution of the sentence.

From 1946 to 1950 he studied physics at the Technical University of Berlin . From 1950 he was Ernst Ruska's doctoral student at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society Berlin-Dahlem and was awarded a Dr.-Ing. PhD. From 1952 to 1954 he was an assistant at this institute, where, among other things, Max von Laue was his teacher and had a great influence on his further research.

During the war, Reichardt had already met the zoologist Bernhard Hassenstein , who introduced him to biological thought processes and with whom he developed interdisciplinary theories about movement vision. In 1954 Reichardt was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology with Max Delbrück , from 1955 he was an assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen with Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer .

In 1958 he founded the cybernetics research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen together with Bernhard Hassenstein and the electronics technician Hans Wenking . When Bernhard Hassenstein moved to the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in 1960 , Reichardt became head of an independent department at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, which became the nucleus of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics , founded in 1968 .

At the age of 68, Reichardt collapsed and died at the end of a symposium that his colleagues and friends had organized to say goodbye to active science.

The Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neurosciences (CIN) in Tübingen is named after Werner Reichardt . The CIN is a cluster of excellence within the framework of the Excellence Initiative , it is one of the largest working groups in the field of interdisciplinary neurosciences worldwide.

Act

Reichardt's discoveries made a decisive contribution to the understanding of information processing in nervous systems. From joint work (with Bernhard Hassenstein and Hans Wenking) on ​​the visual system of insects and its influence on flight orientation, the correlation model was developed, which can also be demonstrated in the human visual system and has led to a general theory of movement perception.

honors and awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member entry by Werner Reichardt at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 7, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Reichardt, Werner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reichardt, Werner Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist, biologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1992
Place of death Tübingen