Richard Becker (German pronunciation: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈbɛkɐ]; 3 December 1887 – 16 March 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, superconductivity, and quantum electrodynamics.
Arthur Robert von Hippel (November 19, 1898 – December 31, 2003) was a German American materials scientist and physicist. Von Hippel was a pioneer in the study of dielectrics, ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials, and semiconductors and was a codeveloper of radar during World War II.
Harmut Kallmann (5 February 1896 – 11 June 1978) was a German physicist. He is known for his work on the scintillation counter for the detection of gamma rays.
Reinhard Mecke (born 14 July 1895 in Stettin; died 30 December 1969) was a German physicist, who focused on chemical physics. He was one of the pioneers of infrared spectroscopy.
Reinhard Mecke studied from 1913 mathematics and physics at the universities of Freiburg, Bern and Marburg and did his doctorate at Franz Richarz in Marburg in 1920 on halos in homogeneous nebulas. He then worked for Heinrich Konen at the university of Bonn, where he habilitated in 1923 on spectral bands of jod and where he became a privatdozent. 1927 he married one of his PhD students M. Guillery and had with her nine children including Dieter Mecke.
1932 he became extraordinary professor for chemical physics at the University of Heidelberg, as proposed by Max Trautz. He investigated spectral bands of evaporated water and infrared and Raman spectroscopy of small organic molecules. He proved the existence of the spin onto rotary oscillation spectra of molecules. 1937 he became professor for theoretical physics at the university of Freiburg and investigated there hydrogen bonds by infrared spectroscopy. 1942 he became ordinary professor and director of the Institute for Physical Chemistry. Additionally, he was in 1958 the founder and until 1968 the director of the Institute for electric materials (Institut für Elektrowerkstoffe) of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the head of the Institute for Physical Chemistry. 1963 he retired in Freiburg.
1964 he became member of the Leopoldina. 1965 he received the Bunsen medal.
He was co-author of the Handbuch der Physik by Geiger and Scheel. His article Vorlesungstechnik with Anton Lambertz of the first volume was also published as a book. He was one of the organisers of the Conferences of nobel laureates in Lindau.
Harald Ernst Malmsten Schering (November 25, 1880 – April 10, 1959) was a German physicist born in Göttingen. He is best known for his work in high voltage electricity and the Schering Bridge used in electrical engineering. Schering was the son of Ernst Schering, mathematician at the Göttingen Observatory. His mother came from a family of Swedish academics who worked with Ernst to translate works from French and Italian. Harald grew up with his two siblings in Göttingen and studied physics at the University of Göttingen. In 1903 he worked at the Geophysical Institute and obtained a Ph.D. in 1904 under Eduard Riecke with work on the Elster-Geitel dispersal apparatus. Beginning in 1905 he was a scientific assistant at the Physics and Technology Institute in Berlin Charlottenburg; today known as the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). His work at the PTB under Emil Warburg primarily dealt with high voltage/high current research and development, and in 1914 he developed a measurement methodology for examining current transformers. In 1914 he was drafted into the First World War and was injured in 1916. In 1918 he became head of the high-voltage lab, succeeding Karl Willy Wagner. In 1919 he attained the title of professor at PTB with an annual salary of 4500 Marks and 1500 Marks as housing allowance. In 1924 he wrote a book on insulators in high voltage. A new institute was established in Hannover, buts construction was delayed by the war. Beginning in 1927, Schering was a professor of electrical engineering and high voltage technology at the Technical University of Hannover (today known as the Leibniz University Hannover). In 1933, he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. He retired in 1949 but continued to work at the PTB until 1954 when Gerhard Pfestdorf took up a position to head the institution.Schering is remembered for invention of the Schering Bridge, which he developed along with Ernst Alberti is an AC bridge circuit used to measure capacitance and the dissipation factor of capacitors. Schering received a Golden Doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1954 and an honorary doctorate from Braunschweig. He was awarded the Great Cross of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.
Max Jakob (July 20, 1879 – January 4, 1955) was a German physicist known for his work in the field of thermal science.
Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Jakob studied engineering at Technical University Munich, from which he graduated in 1903. From 1903 to 1906, he was an assistant to O. Knoblauch at the Laboratory for Technical Physics. In 1910, Jakob embarked on a 25-year career at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg, Berlin. During this time he founded and directed applied thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow laboratories.Fleeing Nazi persecution, Jakob left Germany in 1936 and immigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) and a consultant in heat transfer for Armour Research Foundation. There he conducted research, covering areas such as steam and air at high pressure, devices for measuring thermal conductivity, the mechanisms of boiling and condensation, and flow in pipes and nozzles.His many years of teaching, consulting, and writing resulted in contributions to the literature of the profession; nearly 500 books, articles, reviews and discussions have been published based on his research. He has published a number of books in thermal sciences including Elements of Heat Transfer and Insulation (1942) and Heat Transfer (1956).
He is credited with devising the Jakob dimensionless number, aka Jakob number, which is used in phase change heat transfer calculations:
J
a
=
c
p
,
f
(
T
w
−
T
s
a
t
)
h
f
g
{\displaystyle Ja={\frac {c_{p,f}(T_{w}-T_{sat})}{h_{fg}}}}
The Max Jakob Memorial Award, the highest honor in the field of heat transfer, was established in 1961 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Heat Transfer Division in honor of Jakob.
Alfred Landé (13 December 1888 – 30 October 1976) was a German-American physicist known for his contributions to quantum theory. He is responsible for the Landé g-factor and an explanation of the Zeeman effect.
Rudolf Seeliger (12 November 1886 – 20 January 1965) was a German physicist who specialized in electric discharges in gases and plasma physics.
From 1906 to 1909, Seeliger studied at the University of Tübingen and the University of Heidelberg. He then became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, where he got his doctorate in 1910. The topic of his thesis, the physics of electrical currents in gas, set the theme for his life’s field of research. He then went to conduct postgraduate research, on the same topic, at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Berlin. In 1915, he was also a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. In 1918, he was called by Johannes Stark, Director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Greifswald, to be extraordinarius professor there. In 1921, Seeliger took the position of ordinarius professor for theoretical physics at the University. He became Director of the Institute of Physics in 1940, and was succeeded in 1955, by Walter Schallreuter, who had been a co-author with Seeliger on a physics textbook series.In collaboration with Ernst Gehrcke at the PTR, Seeliger continued his research on electrical discharges in gases. In the spring of 1912, Gehrcke and Seeliger determined that light from cathode rays (electron beams) passing through gases, such as nitrogen and mercury vapor, became longer in wavelength, as the velocity of the cathode rays were slowed, i.e., becoming lower in energy. These results, through experiments in 1912 and 1913, were clarified and interpreted, by James Franck and Gustav Hertz, nephew of Heinrich Hertz; for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom, Franck and Hertz were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.In 1946, Paul Schulz founded the Forschungsstelle für Gasentladungsphysik (Research Center for Gas Discharge Physics) under the Academy of Sciences. When Schulz left in 1949, Seeliger became director. In 1950, the center was renamed the Institut für Gasentladungsphysik (Institute for Gas Discharge Physics). In 1969, the institute was reassigned to the Zentralinstitut für Elektronenphysik (Central Institute of Electron Physics). On 31 December 1991 the Institut für Gasentladungsphysik was dissolved and reopened the next day as the Institut für Niedertemperatur-Plasmaphysik e.V. and became part of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community.From 1946 to 1948, Seeliger was Rector of the University of Greifswald.
Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger (; German: [ˈɡaɪɡɐ]; 30 September 1882 – 24 September 1945) was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discovered the atomic nucleus. He also carried the Bothe–Geiger coincidence experiment that confirmed the conservation of energy in light-particle interactions.
He was the brother of meteorologist and climatologist Rudolf Geiger.
Friedrich Hermann Hund (4 February 1896 – 31 March 1997) was a German physicist from Karlsruhe known for his work on atoms and molecules.