Fritz Houtermans
Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans ( born January 22, 1903 in Sopot near Gdansk, † March 1, 1966 in Bern ) was a German physicist.
Life
He was the son of the living in Sopot wealthy banker Otto Houtermans, but grew up in Vienna with his single mother, who earned his fourth chemist Elsa Wanek on.
His studies in physics (1922-1928) graduated Houtermans in Göttingen. There he received his doctorate in 1927 with James Franck with a thesis on the fluorescence of mercury vapor. From 1928 to 1933 Houtermans held a post as assistant Gustav Hertz at the Technical University Berlin. During this time he published together with RE Atkinson in the Journal of Physics a famous work On the question of the possibility of construction of the elements in stars, which represents a significant step in understanding the element formation and release of energy in stars.
Because of its left-wing attitude and his membership in the Communist Party had Houtermans 1933, after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, to emigrate to England. There he worked at His Master's Voice, a well-known company in the music business. Apparently dissatisfied with his situation there and also because of his pro-Communist attitude was Houtermans 1935 in the Soviet Union, where he was employed in Kharkov at the Ukrainian Institute of Technical Physics and.
On December 1, 1937 Houtermans was arrested victims of Stalin's purges and Moscow. After two years in prison, he was extradited in 1940 due to the German -Soviet non-aggression pact with Germany, where he was rearrested by the Gestapo. However, the physicist Max von Laue was able to use his influence to bring about his release and give him a job at Manfred von Ardenne private research institute in Berlin. There he accomplished in a short time significant research, which he put together in a secret report to the question of the release of nuclear chain reactions ( 1941). In this report Houtermans says, before the discovery of plutonium by Glenn T. Seaborg and his collaborators, new elements heavier than uranium ( transuranic elements ), and pointed to the possibility to use these elements to produce energy. Although this report state agencies and some in the uranium project organized physicists was accessible, but he seems to have had no influence on the German nuclear project.
After a brief period of 1944-1945 at the Physico- Technical Institute in Berlin Houtermans was until 1952 worked in Göttingen, where he began to discuss among other determining the age of rocks. In 1950 Houtermans wrote with KF Schteppa, one of his fellow sufferers in Soviet captivity, under the pseudonyms F. Beck and W. Godin a book entitled Russian Purge and The Extraction of Confession, in which they share their experiences in Soviet prisons report.
From 1952 until his death in 1966 Houtermans was a professor at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland hold. Among other things, he has been there with geochemistry, cosmochemistry, cosmic radiation, and thermoluminescence of meteorites research and gave the Physics Institute as director international reputation. He calculated using uranium - lead dating, based on uranium-lead isotope data of the meteorite Canon Diablo, which had been measured by Clair Cameron Patterson, an age of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago and published this in December 1953. This was one of first publications in which the generally accepted today for Creation was mentioned. Friedrich Begeman, at the time a doctoral student at Houtermans, reported that Patterson earlier, his hand again resorting to computational models of Houtermans even calculated the age of the earth and in September 1953 at a conference on Nuclear Processes in Geologic Settings, Williams Bay, Wisconsin has presented and published in the Proceedings. Patterson published the age, which he had intended for some meteorites and the Earth, 1955 and 1956 in several articles in scientific journals.
Honors
1973, the lunar crater Houtermans was named after him.
Since 1990, awarded by the European Association of Geochemistry annually the Houtermans Award.