Friedrich Beck

Friedrich Beck ( born February 16, 1927 in Wiesbaden, † 20 December 2008) was a German physicist.

Schools and Universities

As the son of the businessman Fritz Beck and his wife Margaret Cron, he attended the Real Gymnasium in Darmstadt. After that, he began studying physics in Göttingen and at the TH Darmstadt. As a student of Max von Laue, he drew on his work on the electro-dynamic potential of a superconductor and developed from the spring of 1950 his PhD thesis entitled The electro- dynamic potential in the extended phenomenological theory of superconductivity, which he. 1952 his appointment as Dr. rer nat. obtained.

Studies, postdoctoral and lecturer

From 1952 to 1954 he worked as an assistant at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin. This was followed from 1954 to 1956 a research stay in the USA as a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the University of Cambridge ( Mass.). After that he went to the University of Munich and reached there in 1958 Habilitation with a theme about nuclear reactions as a result of electromagnetic interactions. From 1958 to 1960 he worked as a lecturer at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg.

Professorship

At the University of Frankfurt in 1960 he set up as an Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics. At the Technical University of Darmstadt, he went in 1963 as Professor of Theoretical Physics, where he became head of the Institute of Theoretical Nuclear Physics in the same year. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he taught from 1974 to 1975 as part of a visiting professor. There followed in 1976 a visiting professor at the Universidade Federal Rural of Rio de Janeiro. In 1979 he was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in College Park. There followed in 1983 a stay at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. At the University of Washington in Seattle in 1987 he held a visiting professorship. The following year he was staying at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba. In 1991 he was a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. After he retired in 1995, Professor Jochen Wambach came in 1996, his successor.

Work areas

His main focus areas in the field of theoretical nuclear physics dealt with the application of Vielteilchenmethoden in the treatment of atomic nuclei. Other topics included the theory of nuclear matter and finite nuclei as well as those of the Quantenhadrodynamik. His last major work concerned the scope of the Collaborative Research Center 199 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ( DFG) Molecular Plant Ecophysiology: material acquisition, membrane transport and regulation of fuel consumption.

Collaboration with John C. Eccles

Beginning of the nineties he developed with John Carew Eccles, a model to explain the control of synapses on the basis of quantum physics in the human brain. The corresponding work of Beck were his reflections on the tunneling effect in the activities of synapses in exocytosis. Developed with Eccles model - also known as Beck- Eccles quantum mechanical model of exocytosis - should it, starting from an interactionist dualism, allow to explain how human consciousness means between the lipid bilayer and the presynaptic endings " tunneled " electrons of the influence on the function could have synapses.

Writings

  • Quantum aspects of brain activity and the role of consciousness, in: Proc. NATN. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 69 (1992) 11357-11361.
  • Quantum aspects of brain activity and the role of consciousness with JC Eccles In: JC Eccles How the self controls its brain, from the English by Malte Home, Munich ( Pipper ) 1994, chap. 9 ( p.213 -241 ).
  • Quantum processes in the brain? A gateway to the understanding of consciousness. A physical contribution to the control of neuronal processes, in: Lars Schuster, Jan C. Schmidt ( Eds.), The dethroned human? - Requests of neuroscience to our idea of ​​man, Paderborn 2003
  • Quantum Processes in the Brain: A scientific basis of consciousness with JC Eccles, in: N. Osaka ( Ed. ), Neural Basis of Consciousness, Amsterdam 2003
  • Synaptic Quantum Tunnelling in Brain Activity, in: NeuroQuantology, Vol 16, Issue 2, 2008, p 140-151
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