Establishing Quantum Physics in Berlin: Einstein and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, 1917-1922

ISBN-13: 9783030631215 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 127 str.

Hubert Goenner; Giuseppe Castagnetti

Spis treści

1: Einstein Comes to Berlin

Relations between Einstein and Berlin Physicists 

Einstein’s Recruitment 

What Was Expected from Einstein? 

A New Way of Organizing Research in Physics? 

2: The Foundation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 

The Preliminaries: A First Unsuccessful Attempt to Establish the Institute 

Einstein’s First Years in Berlin 

The Opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 

3: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics under Einstein’s Directorship 1917–1922 

A First Phase of Scarce Activity (1917–1919) 

The Real Start: The Period 1919/20 

The Period 1920/21 

The Period 1922/23 

Einstein Ends His Activities at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 

4: Einstein’s Directorship: An Evaluation 

The Institute’s Spending Policy 

The Scientists Funded 

How Effective Was the Funding 

The Scientific Program 

The Scientific Programs of the Direktorium Members 

Einstein’s Research Program and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 

Einstein and Scientific Research as a Collective Enterprise 

5: Appendix 

O autorze

Hubert Goenner is professor emeritus at the Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Göttingen. He studied mathematics and physics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (1962), receiving his doctorate there (after one year at Yeshiva University under Arthur Komar) in 1966 under Helmut Hönl and K. Westpfahl on contributions to the general-relativistic motion problem of fast, interacting, and self-interacting pole-dipole particles. As a post-doctoral researcher, he was an assistant to Peter Havas at Temple University in Philadelphia, and from 1969 to M. Kohler at the University of Göttingen, where he habilitated in 1973 (local isometric embedding of Riemannian manifolds and Einstein’s theory of gravitation). From 1975, he was a lecturer in Göttingen and from 1980 professor. He retired in 2002, but continued to be active in research. He has been a guest researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Giuseppe Castagnetti studied philosophy of science at the University of Milan. He was an early collaborator of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in Boston, and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He was a respected member of the international family of Einstein scholars, making important contributions to the understanding of Einstein’s call to Berlin, his early relations with astronomers, and his forced emigration by the Nazis. Castagnetti was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from its foundation in 1994 until his untimely death in 2016.