Georg Joos

Georg Jakob Christof Joos (25 May 1894 in Bad Urach, German Empire – 20 May 1959 in Munich, West Germany) was a German experimental physicist. He wrote Lehrbuch der theoretischen Physik, first published in 1932 and one of the most influential theoretical physics textbooks of the 20th Century.

Joos began his higher education in 1912 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He then went to study at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, where he received his doctorate in 1920 under C. Füchtbauer.

After receipt of his doctorate, Joos became a teaching assistant to Jonathan Zenneck at the Technische Hochschule Munich. In 1922, he became a Privatdozent there.

In 1924, he was appointed extraordinarius professor at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, where he lectured on the theory of electrons and the theory of relativity. In 1928, he was appointed ordinarius professor, as successor of Felix Auerbach. In the late 1920s, at the industrial firm Zeisswerke Jena, he reproduced the Michelson–Morley experiment with more refined equipment and confirmed the original results.

Before the publication of Arnold Sommerfeld's six-volume Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik in the 1940s, Lehrbuch der theoretischen Physik by Joos, first published in 1932, was probably one of the most important books on theoretical physics in the 20th Century.

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which resulted in resignations and emigrations of many Jewish physicists, one of them was James Franck, who was director of the Second Physics Institute at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. In 1935, an ordinance related to the Civil Services act, the Law on the Retirement and Transfer of Professors as a Result of the Reorganization of the German System of Higher Education, was used to forcibly transfer Joos to Göttingen to fill Frank's position as ordinarius professor and director of the Second Physics Institute.

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