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686 [1081] FRANCK
GEIGER [1082] Ph.D. in 1906 and where he began a life-long friendship with Bom [1084], During World War I, he fought valiantly for Germany as a volunteer, winning an Iron Cross. Afterward, he worked under Haber [977], In 1920 he received a professorial ap pointment at the University of Got tingen. While there, he and Gustav Hertz [1116] did the work that earned them the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics. This consisted of bombarding gases and vapors with electrons of different ener gies. When the energy was not enough to allow the absorption of a full quantum of energy, the electron rebounded elas tically and there was no light emission. When the energy was enough, a quan tum was absorbed and light was emitted. This fitted in well with Planck’s [887] quantum theory and showed that the inner structure of the atom was quan tized.
At the time, the Bohr [1101] theory was the only one in the field, so the Franck-Hertz experiments were consid ered as bolstering it, but, of course, it equally supports the later and better theories of a quantized atom, such as Schrodinger’s [1117] theory. In 1933 Franck resigned his university position in protest against the policies of the new Nazi government, and in 1934 he was forced to flee Hitler’s anti Semitism. He first joined Bohr in Copen hagen, then went to the United States, where he taught at Johns Hopkins Uni versity and later at the University of Chicago. He became an American citi zen and worked on the atomic bomb project during World War II. He strenuously opposed dropping the atomic bomb on Japan and favored a demonstration before representatives of the United Nations instead, in the hope that this would encourage a ban of the bomb instead of its use. In a petition to the secretary of war in 1945, Franck and others accurately forecast the nuclear stalemate that would follow a failure to ban the bomb. The petition was ignored. After the war Franck recast his Nobel medal, which had been dissolved eleven years before so that it might be carried safely out of Germany. He also made annual visits to Gottingen in his later years and it was during one of these that he died. [1082] GEIGER, Hans Wilhelm (gigh'ger) German physicist Born: Neustadt-an-der-Haardt (now Neustadt-an-der- Weinstrasse), Khineland- Palatinate, September 30, 1882 Died: Potsdam, September 24, 1945
Geiger, the son of a professor of phi lology, obtained his Ph.D. in 1906 at Er langen. A fellowship took him to En gland, where he was Ernest Rutherford’s [996] capable assistant in his work on alpha particle scattering, but with the opening of World War I, he returned to Germany to serve in the artillery. His name is now most famous in con nection with the Geiger counter, a device for detecting energetic subatomic parti cles, invented in 1913. This is a cylinder containing a gas under a high electric potential, one not quite high enough to overcome the resistance of the gas. If the high-energy subatomic particle enters, it ionizes one of the gas molecules. This ion is pulled toward the cathode with great energy and in the process, as a re sult of collisions, it ionizes some more atoms, which in turn begin to move and ionize others. In short, there is an “ava lanche” of ionization, which conducts a momentary electric current that can be recorded as a clicking sound. The click ings of such a Geiger counter record the particles entering, and electronic devices are now used to count the particles auto matically. In 1925 Geiger received a professorial appointment at the University of Kiel, in 1929 one at the University of Tubingen, and in 1936 one at Berlin-Charlotten burg.
He participated briefly in Germany’s abortive attempt to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. In June 1945 Geiger fled the Russian occupation 687 [1083] GODDARD
GODDARD [1083] to Potsdam and died less than two months after the American atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. [1083] GODDARD, Robert Hutchings American physicist Born: Worcester, Massachusetts, October 5, 1882 Died: Baltimore, Maryland, Au gust 10, 1945 Goddard, the son of a machine shop owner, was raised in Boston, a sickly boy whose thoughts turned inward toward what seemed fantasy in those days. His family returned to Worcester when he was sixteen and he went to the Poly technic Institute there, graduating in 1908. He received his Ph.D. in physics at Clark University in Worcester in 1911. He taught at Princeton but re turned to Clark in 1914 and remained there for nearly thirty years. He had a mind daring enough for a science fiction writer, and he was firmly grounded in science, to boot. While still an undergraduate, he described a railway line between Boston and New York in which the trains traveled in a vacuum under the pull of an electromagnetic field and completed their trip in ten min utes. He called it “Traveling in 1950,” but, alas, the railroad trip still took four hours and more when 1950 actually rolled around. He also grew interested in rocketry as a teenager thanks to his reading of H. G. Wells. Already in 1914 he had obtained two patents involving rocket apparatus and by 1919 all this had ripened to the point where he published a small book entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme
by Tsiolkovsky [880], but Goddard went a step further and began to experiment with ordinary gunpowder rockets. In 1923 Goddard tested the first of a new type of rocket engine, one using gasoline, and liquid oxygen as the mo tive force. This was his first revolu tionary advance over previous solid-fuel rockets. (Of course, early rockets were used mostly in Fourth of July celebra tions and similar affairs, but there had been a time in the first half of the nine teenth century when they were used in warfare. The U.S. national anthem speaks of “the rockets’ red glare.”) In 1926 Goddard sent up his first rocket. His wife took a picture of him standing next to it before it was launched. It was about four feet high, six inches in diameter, and was held in a frame like a child’s jungle gym. This, nevertheless, was the grandfather of the monsters that a generation later were to rumble upward from the Transcaspian, from Florida, and from California. Goddard managed to get a few thou sand dollars from the Smithsonian Insti tution and in July 1929 sent up a larger rocket near Worcester, Massachusetts. It went faster and higher than the first. More important, it carried a barometer, a thermometer, and a small camera to photograph the proceedings. It was the first instrument-carrying rocket. Unfortunately Goddard already had a small reputation as a crackpot and, like Langley [711] before him, had earned an editorial in the good, gray New York
folly. The noise of this second rocket brought calls to the police. Officials or dered him to conduct no more rocket ex periments in Massachusetts. Fortunately Lindbergh [1249] inter ested himself in Goddard’s work. He visited Goddard and was sufficiently impressed to persuade Daniel Guggen heim, a philanthropist, to award God dard a grant of $50,000. With this, God dard set up an experimental station in a lonely spot near Roswell, New Mexico. Here he built larger rockets and de veloped many of the ideas that are now standard in rocketry. He designed com bustion chambers of the appropriate shape, and burned gasoline with oxygen in such a way that the rapid combustion could be used to cool the chamber walls. From 1930 to 1935 he launched rockets that attained speeds of up to 550 miles an hour and heights of a mile and a half. He developed systems for steering a rocket in flight by using a rudderlike device to deflect the gaseous exhaust, with gyroscopes to keep the rocket headed in the proper direction. He pat 688 [1084] BORN
EDDINGTON [1085] ented the device of a multistage rocket. He accumulated a total of 214 patents, in fact.
But the United States Government never really became interested in his work. This lack of interest was made easier by the fact that Goddard was a rather withdrawn and suspicious person who preferred to work in isolation. Only during World War II did the government finance him, and then only to have him design small rockets to help navy planes take off from carriers. (One of Goddard’s early inventions was also perfected as the World War II weapon known as the bazooka.) In Germany, meanwhile, rockets were being developed as powerful war weap ons. When German rocket experts were brought to America after the war and were questioned about rocketry, they stared in amazement and asked why American officials did not inquire of Goddard, from whom they had learned virtually all they knew. American officials could not do so be cause Goddard had been neglected dur ing his lifetime and died of throat cancer before that neglect could be made up for. He had lived long enough to learn of the German rockets, and even to see one, but did not live to see the United States step into the space age. However, if the space age could be said to have been manufactured by any one man, that one man was Goddard. In 1960 the United States Government issued a grant of one million dollars for the use of his patents—half to Goddard’s estate and half to the Guggenheim Foun dation. The Goddard Space Flight Cen ter in Maryland is named in his honor. [1084] BORN, Max German-British physicist
Wroclaw, Poland), December 11, 1882
Bom was the son of a professor of anatomy. He was educated in various German universities, obtaining his Ph.D. at Gottingen in 1907. Later, he studied at Cambridge under J. J. Thomson [869]. He lectured at the University of Chicago in 1912 at the invitation of Michelson [835]. In 1915 he accepted a professorship at the University of Berlin, one that was intended to relieve Planck [887] of his teaching duties. In 1921 he moved on to Göttingen. Bom, like Schrödinger [1117], Heisen berg [1245], and Dirac [1256], per formed his most notable work in ham mering out the mathematical basis of quantum mechanics. Bom gave electron waves a probabilistic interpretation: the rise and fall of waves could be taken to indicate the rise and fall in probability that the electron would behave as though it existed at those particular points in the “wave packet.” Like Schrödinger he got out of Ger many as soon as Hitler came to power, moving over to Cambridge in 1933. He became professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1936 and a British subject in 1939. After his retirement in 1953 he returned to Ger many and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics, sharing it with Bothe [1146]. [1085] EDDINGTON, Sir Arthur Stanley English astronomer and physicist
December 28, 1882 Died: Cambridge, November 22, 1944 Eddington, the son of a headmaster, was of Quaker origin and, like Dalton [389], remained a firm Quaker through out his life. He was an infant prodigy and distinguished himself in mathematics at Cambridge (where Whitehead [911] was one of his teachers), being first in his class in 1904. In 1906, he became chief assistant at the Greenwich Obser vatory and in 1913 was appointed pro fessor of astronomy at Cambridge. In 1914, he became director of Cambridge Observatory. He did not serve in World War I for, as a Quaker, he qualified as a conscientious objector.
[1085] EDDINGTON BURT
Eddington’s major contribution to as tronomy arose from his theoretical inves tigation of the interior of stars. The den sity of the sun—and presumably of stars generally—is considerably lower than the earth’s and there were reasons to believe that the sun was gaseous throughout. The question arose, then, of what kept the gas from contracting, under the tre mendous force of stellar gravity, into a tiny, compact mass—something like the white dwarfs that W. S. Adams [1045] had just discovered. Eddington decided that the expansive force of heat and radiation pressure countered the contracting force of grav ity. Since the pressure of the stellar mat ter increased rapidly with depth, the ra diation pressure countering it must also increase and the only way that could happen was because of a rise in tempera ture. Eddington, in the early 1920s, showed quite convincingly that the rise in temperature required was such that its value in the sun’s interior must reach into the millions of degrees. This made it difficult to see how the solar system could start catastrophically with material pulled out of the sun by a passing star, as Chamberlin [766] and Jeans [1053] would have it. Matter at the temperature of the sun’s surface might conceivably condense, but matter from the sun’s interior, at the tempera tures Eddington showed that interior must have, could only expand violently into a thin gas. It could never condense into planets. The temperatures of millions of de grees in the sun’s interior were to prove important the following decade when the nuclear processes powering the sun and other stars were worked out by Bethe [1308], The more massive a star, Eddington went on to show, the greater the pres sures in its interior, and the greater the countering temperatures and radiation pressure, consequently the more lumi nous the star. Thus, in 1924, Eddington announced the mass-luminosity law. It followed, too, that as the mass of a star increased, the expansive force of ra diation pressure increased very rapidly. At masses greater than fifty times that of the sun, the force of radiation pressure would be large enough to blow the star apart, which is why very massive stars do not exist. (To be sure, there are ex tremely large stars from the standpoint of volume, but these are very rarefied and the masses are not past Eddington’s limit. Some stars, at the edge of stability, pulsate, and these are the Cepheid vari ables. Eddington worked out a theoret ical explanation for the behavior of such Cepheids that still passes muster today.) Chandrasekhar [1356] later gave the disruptive force of radiation pressure an important role in stellar evolution. Eddington was among the first, along with Bertrand Russell [1005] and White head, to appreciate the importance of the relativity theories of Einstein [1064]. He was one of the observers of the total eclipse in 1919, which went a long way toward establishing those theories. Ed dington himself was so busy changing plates on that expedition, however, that he did not actually see the eclipse. His treatise on relativity, published in 1923, was considered by Einstein to be the best presentation of the subject in any lan guage. Eddington, like Jeans (with whom he maintained a firm professional enmity), was the author of a number of books on astronomy for the layman in the 1920s and 1930s, notably The Expanding Uni verse, published in 1933. A whole gener ation of youngsters was introduced to Einstein via Eddington. He was knighted in 1930. [1086] BURT, Sir Cyril Lodowic English psychologist Born: Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, March 3, 1883 Died: London, October 10, 1971 Burt, who was educated at Oxford, taught there and at Cambridge, and the universities of Liverpool and London. He developed the art of psychological testing and of statistic study of those testing results. He studied identical twins particularly and labored to show that in 690 [1087] HAWORTH
HESS [1088] telligence was inherited at least to some degree and that people could be divided into groups of which some were, on the average, more intelligent than others. For instance, men were more intelligent than women, Gentiles more intelligent than Jews, Englishmen more intelligent than Irishmen, upper-class Englishmen more intelligent than middle-class En glishmen, who were in turn more intelli gent than lower-class Englishmen. In every case, the results fit the natural prejudice of an upper-class Englishman. There were a number who objected to the results, but those who supported Burt took the attitude that the truth was the truth even if the results didn’t fit the liberal dogma. Burt was knighted, hon ored, revered, and died in the odor of sanctity. After his death, investigation of his work made it clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he had literally made up his figures and adjusted them to suit his prejudices. What he had done was not only incorrect; it was shameful; the worst crime a scientist can commit—and he did so in an area where the world could least afford it. It had just emerged from the incredible racist crimes of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, with its false science labeling people as “superior” and “inferior.” [1087] HAWORTH, Sir Walter Norman (hahrth)
English chemist Born: Chorley, Lancashire, March 19, 1883 Died: Birmingham, March 19, 1950
Haworth, the son of a prosperous busi nessman, was educated at the University of Manchester, where Perkin’s [734] son was one of his teachers. He graduated in 1906, then went on for further education at the University of Gottingen, studying under Wallach [790] and obtaining his Ph.D. in 1910. After working for the government dur ing World War I, he was appointed pro fessor of organic chemistry at the Uni versity of Durham, then in 1925 went on to the University of Birmingham. Much of his research work was done on the structure of the sugars, where he filled in whatever Emil Fischer [833] had left undone. Haworth devised a form of representing the sugar molecules in ring form (rather than placing the carbon atoms in a straight line) which more ac curately presented the molecular struc ture and which was more useful in de scribing chemical reactions in which the sugar was involved. These are still called Haworth formulas. He worked on vita min C, which is related in structure to the simple sugars, and was one of the first (in 1934) to synthesize it. He suggested the name “ascorbic acid” for the vitamin, a name now universally ac cepted. He shared in the 1937 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Karrer [1131]. He worked on the atomic bomb proj ect during World War II and was knighted in 1947. [1088] HESS, Victor Franz Austrian-American physicist
Austria, June 24, 1883 Died: Mount Vernon, New York, December 17, 1964 Hess, the son of a forest warden, ob tained his Ph.D. from the University of Graz in 1906. He was on the faculty of the Vienna Academy of Sciences for a number of years and received a profes sorial appointment at Graz in 1920, which he quickly interrupted for a two- year leave of absence in the United States. During this time Hess was interested in locating the source of the background radiation that showed up in the form of ionizations in the atmosphere, even within containers that were shielded. It was believed that small quantities of ra dioactive material were present every where in the soil and air and that these gave rise to the radiation. Hess was one of those who in 1911 and thereafter sent up balloons carrying Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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