Felix Bloch

Origins and early life

Felix Bloch was born in Zurich on 23 October 1905, the son of Gustav Bloch, a wholesale grain dealer who had settled there in 1890 and become a Swiss citizen, and of Agnes Mayer, a cousin from Vienna.

Work and career

Both of his parents were Jewish, and he grew up in Zurich, where his elder sister, who had stood by him when he was teased at school, died at the age of twelve. He studied engineering and then physics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and in 1928 he became the first doctoral student of Werner Heisenberg at Leipzig, with a thesis on electrons in crystals that founded the quantum theory of solids. He went on to work with Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Kramers, Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi, describing the walls between magnetic domains that bear his name, and in 1932 he returned to Leipzig as a lecturer.

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Bloch, who was Jewish, left Germany, and in 1934 he joined Stanford University, where he became its first professor of theoretical physics and, in 1939, an American citizen. In 1939, at the Berkeley cyclotron with Luis Alvarez, he measured the magnetic moment of the neutron, and after war work at Los Alamos and on radar at Harvard he developed nuclear induction at Stanford in late 1945 with William Hansen and Martin Packard.

Recognition

For this he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1952 with Edward Purcell, who had made the same discovery independently at Harvard, for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith. In 1954 and 1955 he was the first Director-General of CERN in Geneva, then returned to Stanford, where he became Max Stein Professor of Physics in 1961 and retired in 1971.

Later years

He died in Zurich on 10 September 1983, at the age of seventy-seven, and in 2025, on what would have been his hundred and twentieth birthday, his family gave his Nobel medal to CERN.