Gustav Ludwig Hertz
Gustav Ludwig Hertz · Science & Medicine
Nobel laureate in physics for the Franck–Hertz experiment that proved the quantum energy levels of atoms, forced out of his chair in 1935 for his Jewish grandfather
22 juillet 1887, Hambourg, Allemagne — 30 octobre 1975, Berlin-Est, RDA (Allemagne)
Hambourg, Berlin, Leipzig
Gustav Ludwig Hertz is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Nobel laureate in physics for the Franck–Hertz experiment that proved the quantum energy levels of atoms, forced out of his chair in 1935 for his Jewish grandfather
Origins and early life
Gustav Ludwig Hertz was born in Hamburg on 22 July 1887 into the family that had already given physics his uncle Heinrich Hertz, the discoverer of radio waves; their common ancestor, Gustav Ferdinand Hertz — Gustav Ludwig's grandfather and Heinrich's father — had been born a Jew in 1827 and was baptized as a child in 1834, when the whole Hertz family of Hamburg went over to the Lutheran church.
Work and career
This fiche rests on that one grandfather, born a Jew, and on what the Nazi state made of him: in 1935 the racial laws forced Gustav Hertz, a Nobel laureate, out of his chair at the Technical University of Berlin. He had studied under Planck and Rubens in Berlin, and in 1914, with James Franck, performed the experiment that bears their names: firing electrons through mercury vapor, they found that the atoms absorbed energy only in fixed quanta — the direct proof of Bohr's model of the atom with its discrete energy levels, and one of the founding experiments of quantum physics, for which the two men shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1925.
Recognition
Wounded on the Western Front in 1915, he was professor at Halle from 1925 and at Berlin from 1928, and after his dismissal worked for Siemens on isotope separation; in 1945 the Soviets took him, with other German physicists, to Sukhumi on the Black Sea, where for ten years he worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the Soviet atomic project and received a Stalin Prize. He returned in 1954 to East Germany, directed the physics institute of the University of Leipzig, and died in East Berlin on 30 October 1975.
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Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1925/hertz/biographical/
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Nobel laureate in physics for the Franck–Hertz experiment that proved the quantum energy levels of atoms, forced out of his chair in 1935 for his Jewish grandfather
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1925/hertz/biographical/
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