Heinrich Friedrich Weber

Heinrich Friedrich Weber ( born November 7, 1843 in Magdala, † May 24 1912 in Zurich ) was a Swiss physicist.

Life

From about 1861 Heinrich Friedrich Weber attended the University of Jena, where he quickly realized that he lacked mathematical talent, and then devoted himself to physics. Most here influenced him Ernst Abbe, where he wrote his dissertation in 1865 on the diffraction of light. The second half of the 1860s was a weaver lecturer in Pforzheim. Pforzheim was close to University of Heidelberg, where he was with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz in contact, and the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe, where Weber 1870 assistant to Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann was. As Helmholtz was appointed in 1871 to the University of Berlin, he took with Weber as his first assistant. There, Weber helped the next three years to build the lab.

In the years 1872 and 1875 he published two papers in the Annalen der Physik on the specific heat of carbon, boron and silicon at different temperatures. It proved to be at low temperatures to be lower than predicted by the Dulong - Petit law.

Heinrich Friedrich Weber was appointed professor of technical and mathematical physics and head of the physical and electrical engineering laboratories at the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. When young Albert Einstein it was the last straw because the left to say anything.

Weber's data to the specific heat of diamond were later used by Albert Einstein, in his first application of quantum hypothesis to solid body. From his experimental results, he recognized the connection, as the Wien's displacement law caused a sensation ten years later.