Guido Beck

Guido Beck ( born August 29, 1903 in Reichenberg in Bohemia, † October 21, 1988 in Rio de Janeiro) was an Argentine theoretical physicist.

Life and work

Guido Beck grew up in Switzerland, where the family had moved in 1907, and from 1920 in Vienna. After finishing school he studied physics at the University of Vienna and received his PhD in 1925 under Hans Thirring about relativity. Shortly thereafter, he wrote a work on the Compton effect. After that, he worked at the University of Bern, again in Vienna in honor prison and from February 1928 for four years as first assistant to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig

1930/31 he was in Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford, shortly thereafter in Copenhagen and then in Prague. He then worked in Kansas and Japan, where he lectured before the invitation of Yakov Ilich Frenkel 1935 to 1937 at the University of Odessa where he worked had founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Beck went, when the political situation in Russia worsened too much about Copenhagen, where he was Niels Bohr was instrumental in the departure, to Lyon, where he studied at the Atomic Institute of the CNRS. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was interned in France, but he managed again to do research in Montpellier and then to teach in Lyon. Since he was at risk as a Jew, he went in 1941 to Portugal, where he accepted visiting professorships at the Universities of Coimbra and Porto, and from there to Argentina in 1943. He can not save them from Vergasungstod in Auschwitz as a stateless His mother. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires, where proposals included José Antonio Balseiro to his disciples, and from 1951 in Brazil. In 1962 he returned to Argentina to become the successor of Balseiro at the Institute named after this. From 1975 he was at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas físicas ( CBPF ) in Brazil operates. He was instrumental in setting up the training of physicists in South America.

In 1988 he died in a car accident in Rio.

Beck was concerned in the 1920s and 1930s, with nuclear physics and beta decay. Around 1930, he wrote articles on quantum mechanics for the Manual of Radiology and contributions to the Encyclopedia of Physics. In South America, it dealt with further applications of quantum mechanics, for example, in nuclear physics, to scattering problems and the tunnel effect, and with diffraction theory. He played in the construction of university education of South American physicist an important role and was also involved in the efforts of Argentine President Juan Perón, expand the nuclear physics and nuclear research in the 1950s in Argentina.

He was a friend of the writer Ernesto Sabato.

Awards

• Corresponding member of the Academia Brasileira de Ciências
• 1965: Johann Joseph Ritter von Prechtl Medal
• 1972: Honorary Member of the Austrian Physical Society
• 1977: Honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Darmstadt.