Walther Gerlach
| Walther Gerlach | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
1 August 1889 Biebrich, Hessen-Nassau, German Empire |
| Died | 10 August 1979 (aged 90) Munich, West Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions |
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen |
| Alma mater | Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen |
| Doctoral students |
Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber Heinz Billing |
| Known for |
Stern–Gerlach experiment Space quantization |
Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect.
Gerlach was born in Biebrich, Hessen-Nassau, German Empire, as son of Dr. med. Valentin Gerlach and his wife Marie Niederhaeuser.
He studied at the University of Tübingen from 1908, and received his doctorate in 1912, under Friedrich Paschen. The subject of his dissertation was on the measurement of radiation. After obtaining his doctorate, he continued on as an assistant to Paschen, which he had been since 1911. Gerlach completed his Habilitation at Tübingen in 1916, while serving during World War I.
From 1915 to 1918, during the war, Gerlach did service with the German Army. He worked on wireless telegraphy at Jena under Max Wien. He also served in the Artillerie-Prüfungskommission under Rudolf Ladenburg.
Gerlach became a Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen in 1916. A year later, he became a Privatdozent at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. From 1919 to 1920, he was the head of a physics laboratory of Farbenfabriken Elberfeld, formerly Bayer-Werke.
In 1920, he became a teaching assistant and lecturer at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. The next year, he took a position as extraordinarius professor at Frankfurt. It was in November 1921/1922 that he and Otto Stern discovered spin quantization in a magnetic field, known as the Stern–Gerlach effect. Otto Stern (compare his article) was among the nominees for the physics Nobel Prize in 1943 and was awarded the prize on 9 November 1944. The citation did not mention the highly important Stern-Gerlach experiment which Walther Gerlach finally carried out successfully early in 1922 during the Weimar Republic in the absence of Otto Stern who had already moved on to Rostock, thus withholding the honour from Gerlach in view of his continued activity in "Nazi-led" Germany (oral information from Prof. Dr. Horst Schmidt-Böcking, Institute for nuclear physics, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main in 2015, who conserves the unpublished documentation concerning the differing opinions within the Nobel-Committee on the subject of Walther Gerlach. Schmidt-Böcking is also engaged in the physical reassembling of Gerlach's experiment within the planned new Senckenberg-Museum at Frankfurt.
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