Nicholas Kurti

Nicholas Kurti CBE (Hungarian Miklós Kürti ) ( born May 14, 1908 in Budapest, † November 24, 1998 in Oxford ) was a Hungarian- British physicist low temperature.

Life

His father, whose ancestors were called to Magyarization carbuncle, was a banker, but he died around 1911., The Bank granted to his mother, whose ancestors probably came from Galicia and had settled in Abony, a guest house and participated in half to Nicholas training costs.

He attended the Minta Gymnasium in his hometown. As in Hungary for Jews numerus clausus was, he had to continue his further education abroad. His uncle Jozsef Pinter (originally binder from Abony, 1858-1928 ) was an electrical engineer and vice president Tungsram in Budapest, and helped him with his education. Nicholas initially wanted to study chemistry, but the senior physicist Jakab Szentpeter told him in 1924 that there were already too many chemists, and to make money he should study applied physics. With a recommendation from a professor in Vienna he went to the Sorbonne in Paris Paul Langevin, where he earned his master. His PhD in low temperature physics he earned in Berlin with Franz Eugen Simon. After Hitler came to power, he accompanied Simon as an assistant to the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford.

During World War II he worked in the Manhattan Project. With Simon, he developed fundamentals for uranium enrichment by gas diffusion. In 1945 he returned to Oxford and married the following year Giana, with whom he had two children. After him and Simon in a laboratory experiment, the cooling of a substance was heated to a temperature managed by a micro- Kelvin in 1956, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was vice-president from 1965 to 1967.

From 1967 until his retirement in 1975 he was professor of physics at Oxford. He was a visiting professor at City College of New York, at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

He was a cook. As microwave ovens arose around 1969, he put the Royal Society a reverse Baked Alaska ( cold outside and hot inside ) before. He reasoned thus, as he called it, gastro physics ( molecular gastronomy ).

Publications

• Giana Kurti: But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society; ISBN 0-85274-301-7