EPS Historic Site inaugurated in Frankfurt: Born for Modern Physics
On 3 September 2019 the former Institute of Physics of the University of Frankfurt was inaugurated as an “EPS Historic Site” by the European Physical Society.
The Arthur-von-Weinberg-Haus in Frankfurt has a special significance for the history of physics. It has been owned by the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung since 2012. The former Physics Institute of the University of Frankfurt, founded in 1914, was located there. Today it is still the seat of the Frankfurt Physical Society, founded in 1824.
Max von Laue held the first Chair of Theoretical Physics. He moved to the University of Berlin in 1919. His successor was Max Born. After World War I, Born had to face dwindling resources due to the rising inflation. He was able to improve the financial situation of the institute by charging entrance fees for popular lectures he held on the theory of relativity.
This particularly benefited the experiments of Otto Stern who developed the molecular beam method here. It was decisive for the proof of the space quantization predicted by Sommerfeld and Debye, which Stern could furnish, together with Walther Gerlach, in 1922. In 1943 Otto Stern was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for these achievements.
The “Historic Site” plaque of the European Physical Society now commemorates these and other achievements in physics in Frankfurt. The memorial plaque was unveiled on September 3, 2019, during a ceremony in the historic auditorium of the Jügel-Haus, the former main building of the Goethe University on the Bockenheim campus.
“The year 2019 offers two occasions to commemorate Otto Stern, the pioneer of quantum physics and Nobel Prize winner,” explains physicist Horst Schmidt-Böcking, a renowned expert on the life and work of Otto Stern. Stern had developed his molecular beam method in 1919, 100 years ago. “At the same time we remember the 50th anniversary of the death of Otto Stern, who was forced into emigration in 1933 because of his Jewish background,” said Schmidt-Böcking.
Otto Stern settled first in Pittsburgh and then, from 1945, in Berkeley. Unlike many emigrants, he used every opportunity after World War II to visit Europe and to meet his friends and colleagues at conferences. In recent years Schmidt-Böcking established contact with the relatives of Otto Stern in the United States and invited them to their uncle’s old place of work. Stern had no children of his own.
“The Historic Site plaque also recalls other important discoveries at the Physics Institute,” explains Petra Rudolf, President of the European Physical Society: “In 1920, Max Born and Elisabeth Bormann first measured the free path of atoms in gases and the size of molecules. In 1921, the theoretician Alfred Landé postulated the coupling of angular momentum for the first time as the basis of intra-atomic electron dynamics”.
DPG President Dieter Meschede praised the “Historic Sites” initiative of the EPS and especially Horst Schmidt-Böcking’s efforts for winning this award for the former Physikalisches Institut of the University of Frankfurt, the fifth “EPS Historic Site” in Germany, after Berlin, Munich, Würzburg and Heidelberg. “This award is timed perfectly, as this year is the International Year of the Periodic Table,” Meschede underlined. The Stern-Gerlach experiment was crucial for the discovery of the electron spin and the formulation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which governs the building plan of the chemical elements.
The plaque was unveiled during an international conference celebrating Otto Stern: the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus seminar “Otto Stern’s Molecular Beam Research and its Impact on Science”. The Nobel Laureates Theodor Hänsch and Dudley Herschbach were among the participants, as well as Stern’s grand nice Diana Templeton-Killen and his grandnephew Allen Templeton. The plaque will be attached to the former physics building at Robert-Mayer-Straße 2 as soon as the approval of the management of Cultural heritage has been granted.
