Fritz Reiche

Fritz Reiche ( born July 4, 1883 in Berlin, † January 14, 1969 in New York City ) was a German theoretical physicist who lived and worked from 1941 in the U.S..

Life

Rich studied in Munich (1901 - 1902) under Adolf von Baeyer and Wilhelm Röntgen and then in Berlin with Max Planck, where he received his doctorate in 1907; Title of the thesis: laws in the compression of a cavity radiation through a " semi-permeable " plate. After a three-year stay at Otto Lummer in Breslau in 1911, he returned back to the University of Berlin, where he was a lecturer soon. In 1913 he married Berta Ochs, the daughter of the composer and choir director of the Philharmonic Siegfried Ochs. He was for health reasons not a soldier; 1915 to 1918 he was assistant to Planck as successor by Lise Meitner, then he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Berlin- Dahlem. During this time he worked mainly in the field of theoretical optics (particularly spectroscopy). In 1921 he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics in Breslau, as the successor of Erwin Schrödinger. In Breslau empires began to deal more effectively with quantum theory. The position in Breslau he lost in 1933 by the anti-Jewish actions of the Nazi government; He was first a guest lecturer at the German University in Prague, but returned in 1935 to Berlin and emigrated with his family in 1941 finally in the United States. First, he held various teaching posts before he became in 1946 a professor at New York University. There, he taught theoretical physics, wave mechanics and thermodynamics. In addition, he was entrusted by NASA and the U.S. Navy with special research projects for supersonic flow. After his retirement in 1958 he continued his research in the Division of Electromagnetic Research at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Until shortly before his death in 1969, he examined the difference in the number of modes of wave propagation in the magnetosphere hydrodynamics and electrodynamics.

Empire role in the history of the atomic bomb

As Robert Jungk in his book Brighter than a thousand suns, sought the physicist Friedrich Georg Houtermans Fritz Reiche shortly before his departure to the United States in March 1941 and handed him a secret message, which should deliver rich as a courier physicists in the U.S.. It was the atomic bomb. The German physicist would be driven by the Nazi government to build an atomic bomb, but they would - in particular Heisenberg - try to handle the matter hesitant, and not serious about the job. After the presentation Jungk's kingdom has delivered this message Rudolf Ladenburg, the kingdoms of Berlin and Breslau knew; these have forwarded it to Washington. As is apparent from the scientific annex to the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Göttingen 2001), there are strong doubts as to whether Heisenberg and his team actually wanted to thwart the construction of the bomb. In this respect, the truth of the description of Jungk's lies regarding the role empire in the dark.

Publications

Fritz Reiche has 55 scientific papers published mostly essays in journals. Particularly noteworthy is his book

  • The quantum theory. Their origin and development. Berlin 1921 - English edition:. The Quantum Theory. London 1922 -. 2nd Ed. 1924 -. 3rd Ed. 1930th - American Edition: New York 1922 - 2nd. . Ed. 1930th - Spanish Edition: La teoría de los cuantos. Madrid 1922

A complete list of publications contains the biography of Valentin Wehefritz.

Biographical Literature

  • Valentin Wehefritz University in Exile 5: Scattered traces. Prof. Dr. phil. Fritz Reiche. University Library, Dortmund 2002, ISBN 3-921823-28-5
  • Physicist ( 20th century)
  • University teachers (Breslau)
  • High school teachers (The New School)
  • University teachers (New York University)
  • Emigrant from the German Empire at the time of National Socialism
  • Americans
  • German
  • Born in 1883
  • Died in 1969
  • Man
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