Max Abraham

Max Abraham ( March 26, 1875 in Gdansk, † November 16, 1922 in Munich) was a German theoretical physicist.

Life

Abraham came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family. He studied physics at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1897 at the Max Planck; then he worked as an assistant to Planck. From 1900 to 1909 he was an unpaid private lecturer in Göttingen. In 1909 he took a position at the University of Illinois (USA ), but he returned after a few months back to Göttingen. At the invitation of Tullio Levi -Civita, he went on to Milan where he became professor of rational mechanics. The outbreak of the First World War forced him to return to Germany, where he represented a physics professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart. In 1921 he became a professor in Aachen, however, he fell ill with a brain tumor and died a short time later the following year.

Work

Abraham's scientific work was most directly related to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism; he wrote a two -volume work on electrodynamics ( "Theory of Electricity" ), which was quickly reissued as a standard work and revised several times. It was the first volume ( 1904), an adaptation of the book by August Foppl (1894 ) whereas the second volume (1905 ) was written by Abraham alone.

By 1902, he developed a theory that electrons are perfect rigid spheres with uniformly distributed on the surface charge. This was the first field theoretical conception of the electron, which had great influence on the further development of the electron theory. He coined the terms " longitudinal " and " transverse " electromagnetic mass, said his information with the experiments by Walter Kaufmann (1901, 1905) for the time being even seemed to agree better than the corresponding formulas for the " relativistic mass " by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Albert Einstein. Only by the experiments of Alfred Bucherer (1908 ) and other things changed. The principle of relativity and the theory of relativity, he refused at all - although he realized more quickly than many others - because they disagreed with the assumption of an electromagnetic nature of all physical processes. Abraham also has preferred to stick to the ether hypothesis, which he is more in line with the " common sense " as felt.

He led an extensive correspondence with Einstein and finally settled ( to 1912) to convince the extent that the Special Relativity Theory ( SRT) is logically correct; yet he held it unfit to describe the physical reality. In addition, he designed his own theory of gravity, where there was a dispute with Einstein in this context. Abraham (1912 ) believed that Einstein had shifted the " coup de grace " during his work on the principle of equivalence by an object of unrestricted validity of the light constancy of the SRT, but this was immediately rejected by Einstein. Despite the different opinions Einstein recognized that Abraham was one of the few who understood his efforts in developing the general theory of relativity - even if he refused.

After his death, Max Born and Max von Laue wrote in an obituary about him:

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