Friedrich Bopp | |
---|---|
Born | 27 December 1909 |
Died | 14 November 1987 | (aged 77)
Nationality | German |
Fields | Theoretical physics |
Institutions |
Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich |
Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
Doctoral advisor | Fritz Sauter |
Doctoral students |
Friedrich L. Bauer Rudolf Haag Klaus Samelson |
Friedrich Arnold Bopp (27 December 1909 – 14 November 1987) was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik and with the Uranverein. He was a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a President of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. He signed the Göttingen Manifesto.
From 1929 to 1934, Bopp studied physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Göttingen. He completed his Diplom thesis in 1933 under the mathematician Hermann Weyl. In 1934, he became an Assistant (Assistant) at Göttingen. In 1937, Bopp completed his doctorate on the subject of Compton scattering under the physicist Fritz Sauter. From 1936 to 1941, he was a teaching assistant at Breslau University. In 1941, Bopp completed his Habilitationsschrift under Erwin Fues on the subject of a consistent field theory of the electron.
From 1941 to 1947, Bopp was a staff scientist at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik (KWIP, after World War II reorganized and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics), located in Berlin-Dahlem. He worked on the German nuclear energy project; collaborators on aspects of this project were for a time known collectively as the Uranverein (Uranium Club). In 1944, when most of the KWIP was evacuated to Hechingen in Southern Germany due to air raids on Berlin, he went there too, and he was the Institute’s Deputy Director there. When the American Alsos Mission evacuated Hechingen and Haigerloch, near the end of World War II, French armed forces occupied Hechingen. Bopp did not get along with them and described the initial French policy objectives towards the KWIP as exploitation, forced evacuation to France, and seizure of documents and equipment. In order to put pressure on Bopp to evacuate the KWIP to France, the French Naval Commission imprisoned him for five days and threatened him with further imprisonment if he did not cooperate in the evacuation. During his imprisonment, the spectroscopist Hermann Schüler, who had a better relationship with the French, persuaded the French to appoint him as Deputy Director of the KWIP. This incident caused tension between the physicists and spectroscopists at the KWIP and within its umbrella organization the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society).