Yuriy Rumer

Yuri Borisovich Rumer (Russian Юрий Борисович Румер, known in the West as Georg Rumer, born April 28, 1901 in Moscow, † 1 February 1985) was a Soviet theoretical physicist.

Life

Rumer studied at the Moscow State University. He was from 1927 to 1932 with Max Born at Göttingen University, where he worked with Edward Teller, Hermann Weyl and Walter Heitler and Born (mainly on the quantum theory of chemical bonds ). During this time he also met several times Albert Einstein in Berlin. From 1934 he worked with Igor Tamm at the Physics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences ( FIAN ) in Moscow. He was then at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkov, where he worked with Lev Landau, with whom he was friends. In 1938 he was part of the " Great Purges " as well as Landau and his friend Korets arrested ( after the three a antistalinistisches pamphlet written ), was long in prison, worked from 1944 at the Soviet atomic bomb project ( in a secret special prison, a sharashka, near Sukhumi ) and then had five years in exile in Siberian district Yenisejsk, where he taught at a teacher training college. In the Khrushchev era he was rehabilitated.

He was director of the company founded in 1962 Institute for Radio Physics and Electronics in Novosibirsk, where at that time laser research has been conducted. He was also a professor at the Novosibirsk State University. Later, he was a researcher at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk.

Work

In his early years in Western Europe, he dealt among other things with general relativity theory, applications of quantum theory in chemistry, cosmic cosmic radiation, sound absorption in solids, theory of the Hilbert space and quantum electrodynamics.

With Landau, he wrote a popular book on relativity theory, which was also translated into German and English, among others, ( 1960). He also worked on general relativity and wrote essays and a Russian book on the five-dimensional Kaluza - Klein theory (published in 1956), when he was still in exile in Siberia.

In Novosibirsk Edward Shuryak was one of his students.

Writings

• With Landau: What is the theory of relativity. 13th edition. Teubner, 1989.