Chair Of Physics Research Articles

The protective action of carotenoids on fluorescence of chlorophyll b.

Photochemistry and PhotobiologyVolume 11, Issue 6 p. 559-563 THE PROTECTIVE ACTION OF CAROTENOIDS ON FLUORESCENCE OF CHLOROPHYLL b D. FRACKOWIAK, D. FRACKOWIAK Chair of Physics, College of Agriculture, Poznan, PolandSearch for more papers by this authorZ. SALAMON, Z. SALAMON Chair of Physics, College of Agriculture, Poznan, PolandSearch for more papers by this author D. FRACKOWIAK, D. FRACKOWIAK Chair of Physics, College of Agriculture, Poznan, PolandSearch for more papers by this authorZ. SALAMON, Z. SALAMON Chair of Physics, College of Agriculture, Poznan, PolandSearch for more papers by this author First published: June 1970 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-1097.1970.tb06028.xCitations: 4AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume11, Issue6June 1970Pages 559-563 RelatedInformation

Plans for new Cavendish

Plans are being made to rebuild the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. According to Sir Nevill Mott, holder of the Cavendish Chair of experimental physics, the department presently occupies 160 000 sq ft but could need up to 350 000 for advanced teaching and research and elementary laboratories.

Additional Chair of Physics in the University of Leeds: Prof. J. S. Dugdale

Additional Chair of Physics in the University of Leeds: Prof. J. S. Dugdale

Second Chair of Physics in Queen's College, Dundee: Prof. K. J. Standley

Second Chair of Physics in Queen's College, Dundee: Prof. K. J. Standley

Second Chair of Physics in the University of East Anglia : Prof. N. E. Cusack

Second Chair of Physics in the University of East Anglia : Prof. N. E. Cusack

Belfer Award

Yeshiva University presented its third annual Belfer Graduate School of Science Award to P. A. M. Dirac on November 15 for his “outstanding contributions to science.” At the same time, the University announced that it was establishing, in his honor, a Dirac Chair of Physics. Professor Dirac, who has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University since 1932, has been at Yeshiva during the current academic year as a visiting professor of physics.

American Association of Physics Teachers

BEGINNING with this month's issue, the American Journal of Physics, which is the official publication of the American Association of Physics Teachers, will be under the editorship of Walter C. Michels of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Professor Michels, who holds the Marion Reilly Chair of Physics and is chairman of Bryn Mawr's Physics Department, succeeds the Journal's former editor, Thomas H. Osgood, who is now on leave from his post as dean of the Graduate School at Michigan State University while serving as the State Department's scientific attaché assigned to the United States Embassy in London. Dean Osgood was the Journal's second editor and served in that capacity for a period of ten years.

The Rutherford Memorial Lecture, 1958

Five years ago in this University Sir James Chadwick gave the second Rutherford Memorial Lecture. I have read it many times and find it an admirable account of Rutherford’s scientific career and a wise and understanding description of his outstanding genius as an experimental physicist. Chadwick gave special emphasis to Rutherford’s remarkable achievements during his tenure of the MacDonald Chair of Physics here at McGill and to the great debt that the world of science owes to this University in giving such excellent facilities to such a young man. Together with the four other Memorial Lectures given under the auspices of the Royal Society, a very complete account has been given of Rutherford’s life and achievements. I will not attempt to recapitulate the story, but will content myself with a commentary on certain aspects of Rutherford’s attitude to the art of the experimenter which seem to be of special interest today. Here in McGill the exponential decay with time of radioactive substances was first observed and interpreted as being due to spontaneous disintegration of an atom. A quarter of a century elapsed before this brilliant phenomenological interpretation by Rutherford and Soddy was to receive a theoretical explanation in terms of wave mechanics. Today, with the surprising developments of the last decade and the discovery of whole families of unstable elementary particles, we now see that the spontaneous decay of one subatomic bit of matter into lighter pieces is one of the most significant facts of the subatomic world. In point of fact, these families of elementary particles are superficially not unlike the families of radioactive elements which Rutherford and his co-workers did so much to disentangle. An outstanding difference is, of course, that no one has found a theoretical explanation of the spontaneous decay of elementary particles and most theorists believe that none is to be sought, but that such behaviour is just a fundamental property of microscopic matter.

A scientific career.

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume I · Number 4 · Summer 1958 A SCIENTIFIC CAREER GEORGE HEVESY, Ph.D. {hon.), D.Sc. {hon.), M.D. {hon.)* I was born in Budapest the ist ofAugust, 1885. After terminating my studies at the Gymnasium ofthe Piarist Order in that city, I studied a short time in Berlin and later in Freiburg, mainly chemistry and physics, where I took my degree in 1908 and received an honorary degree forty years later. The subject ofmy doctoral thesis was the interaction between metallic sodium and molten sodium hydroxide, an interaction responsible for a poor yield often obtained when producing sodium by electrolysis of molten sodium hydroxide. Being interested in high-temperature chemistry, after obtaining my degree , I proceeded to Zurich to work under Richard Lorenz, the then most eminent representative of that branch of science. The Technical Highschool ofZurich was in those days, as it is today, a great place oflearning and teaching. The Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industry could not have reached that very high standard it represents today without the aid of a great number of able chemists, most of them trained at the Technical Highschool ofZurich. When Ijoined that institution, the permanent head ofthe chemistry department was Willstätter. Einstein's First Lecture Shortly after my arrival at Zurich, Einstein was appointed associate professor oftheoretical physics in the university ofthat city. I was one ofthe audience ofabout twenty who attended his inaugural lecture on the determination of the ratio of charge and mass of the electron. (Einstein left after a few years for Prague and returned later to Zurich to fill the chair of theoretical physics in the Technical Highschool.) When Einstein visited our laboratory, I had the privilege to show him round. I remember vividly * 18 Norr Mälarstrand, Stockholm K, Sweden. 345 his astonishment upon being shown a hydrogen electrode. He thought such an electrode to be a fiction only. Twenty-three years later, after terminating my Baker lectureship in the Cornell University at Ithaca, I met Einstein at Pasadena. I visited a barber shop whose owner, a son ofthe City ofConstance, praised the beauties of life in California, mentioning that his only wish in life was to be permitted once to cut Einstein's hair. I told him that this wish would not be easy to fulfill as, according to rumors, it was Mrs. Einstein who performed this work. When I told Einstein about the barber's wish, he remarked: "Da er sich auf Ihrem Kopfe nicht austoben konnte, wollte er meinen Kopf haben" ("As he could not sufficiently exercise himselfon your head [I had poor hair] he wants to have mine"). Einstein talked repeatedly to me on the problem of causality. He disagreed with Bohr's views on this topic. He asked me to take over a message to Bohr. He wished an explanation on a classical basis. When Lorenz left Zurich for the University ofFrankfurt (incidentally, I was asked after his death to fill his chair, which I could not accept), Willstätter called on me to make the short statement: "In Germany the assistant belongs to the professor, in Switzerland to the laboratory—you stay here." 1 did not, as I got much interested in the catalytic synthesis of ammonia by Haber, a discovery which at that date rightly impressed deeply all those interested in chemistry. My monthly salary in Zurich ofthe equal of $36 was entirely adequate, as I was charged for a very nice room and two good meals $15 a month. When I was promoted to a "first assistant," I was told that my salary would be raised to $60 a month, the highest sum ever allotted an assistant. When I was leaving the laboratory one evening together with Willstätter , he told me that he was moving to Berlin to take over one ofthe Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. I asked him, much astonished, why he was leaving. He was the permanent chiefof the chemistry faculty and had a very fine laboratory and postgraduate students from all over the world were anxious to work under his guidance. His answer was: "Ifthe fatherland calls, my duty is to go." Thirty-two years later I was present...

The Rutherford Memorial Lecture, 1953

It is a very great privilege to be invited to deliver the Rutherford Memorial Lecture, and especially to give it in this University, with which his name will be forever associated. The first of these memorial lectures was given last year by Sir John Cockcroft in New Zealand, where Rutherford was born and received his education. It is most fitting that the second lecture should be delivered here, for McGill University gave Rutherford his first post, electing him to the Macdonald Chair of Physics when he was only 27 years old. He was particularly attracted to McGill, for, as he wrote at the time, ‘The physical laboratory is the best of its kind in the world’. He appre­ciated the opportunity which was thus offered to him to develop his own line of work and he seized it in his own remarkable way.

Solid State Symposium

As a means of welcoming Paul P. Ewald, formerly of Queens University in Belfast, to the chair of physics of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, an all day conference was held last October 15 on the physics of the solid state. The conference, which was sponsored jointly by the Institute and the Metropolitan section of the American Physical Society, was opened with a paper by Professor Ewald, in which he reviewed the program and placed the various scheduled topics in the general context of crystal physics.

Physics at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College: Prof. J. Rotblat

DR. J. ROTBLAT, who has recently been appointed to succeed Prof. E. L. Hopwood in the chair of physics at St. Baratholomew's Hospital Medical College, London, Polish by birth and was educated in Warsaw, graduating at the Free University of poland His first research was on the properties of gases at low pressures, but he soon turned to nuclear physics, working under the direction of Prof. Werten-stein. In 1936 he was awarded the degree of doctor of physics and became assistant director in the Department of Atomic Physics, in the development of which he took an active part. Dr. Rotblat came to Great Britain in the spring of 1939, to work in nuclear physics at Liverpool, where, except for a period of war work in the United States, he has since remained. From the beginning of the War, he took an ever increasing part in the work of the Physics Department at Liverpool, showing outstanding ability in teaching as well as in research. He made valuable contributions to the development of atomic energy in Great Britain, by his own work and by his leadership of a research group. His administrative capacity has been shown in his work as chairman of panels of the Nuclear Physics Committee, one for the promotion of the photographic emulsion technique and the other for the co-ordination of work on new cyclotrons; above all, perhaps, in his work on the Atom Train Exhibition, the success of which was largely due to him. In the past two years Dr. Rot-blat's research interest has turned towards the medical applications of physics, more especially the use of radioactive isotopes, a line of work which should find ample scope for development in his new post.

Prof. A. Lo Surdo

ITALIAN geophysics lost one of its most notable leaders on June 7 with the death, at the age of sixty-nine, of Prof. Antonino Lo Surdo, founder and director of the National Institute of Geophysics at Rome. Born in Syracuse, he graduated in physics at Messina. The great Messina earthquake of 1908 robbed him of all his family, save a brother, a loss that cast a shadow of sadness over his whole later life, in which he contracted no further family ties. He taught and carried out rearch at Messina and, from 1919, at the University of Rome, where he held the chair of physics until his death ; he gave great attention to experimental demonstrations in his teaching.

University of the Witwatersrand : Nuclear Physics Exhibition

THE chair of physics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, became vacant last year upon the retirement of Prof. H. H. Paine. The newly appointed head of the Department of Physics, Prof. G. T. R. Evans, delivered his inaugural lecture in the Great Hall of the University on September 23, taking as his subject "Radium : 1898-1948". Prof. Evans took the opportunity of paying a tribute to the memory of Madame Marie Curie and her husband. The vice-chancellor, Principal H. R. Raikes, who presided, expressed the appreciation of the University at the presence of M. Lancial, the Minister Plenipotentiary of the French Republic in South Africa, In connexion with the inaugural lecture there was held a two-day Exhibition in the Department of Physics under the direction of Prof. G. T. R. Evans. The film, "Marie Curie", was shown in the Great Hall ; shorter films, "The Nuclear Structure of the Atom" and "Atomic Energy", were shown in the lecture theatre of the Department. The exhibition of nuclear phenomena, apparatus and films was open daily from 2.30 p.m. and attracted several thousand people. The exhibits included items of historic interest contributed by Madame Irene Joliot-Curie. Prof. A. M. Tyndall, of the University of Bristol, exhibited a collection of photomicrographs of nuclear tracks in photographic emulsions. The National Physical Laboratory of Pretoria demonstrated artificial radioactivity in biology. Other exhibits appreciated by the lay public were a working model of a cyclotron, a Wilson cloud chamber, Geiger counters and scalars, the medical use of radium and South African fluorescent minerals. This is the third exhibition organised by the Department of Physics since 1945 ; the crowds which gathered round the demonstrators until long after the hour for closing constituted convincing evidence of the appreciation of the Department‘s efforts to meet the layman‘s desire for a better understanding of modern physics.

Alexander Ogg, 1870–1948

The death occurred in Johannesburg on February 24, 1948, of the well‐known South African scientist and geomagnetician, Dr. Alexander OggAs a result of some fifty years of research work of first‐rate importance, Dr. Ogg enjoyed a world‐wide reputation as a physicist. In the country of his adoption his outstanding services were widely acclaimed, and it was said of him in 1936, on the occasion of his retirement from the chair of Physics at the University of Cape Town, that to him more than any single man did South Africa owe the extent and high quality of physical research which is being carried out in the Union.

Theoretical Physics at Liverpool : Dr. H. Fröhlich

THE appointment of Dr. H. Fröhlich to the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Liverpool has recently been announced. Dr. Fröhlich has been associated with Prof. N: F. Mott since 1935 in building up the school of theoretical physics at Bristol. He has specialized in nuclear physics, where he has made important contributions to the theory of the meson and to nuclear binding forces, and on dielectrics, where his work on the mechanisms of breakdown and loss are well known. In the latter field Dr. Fröhlich has been prominent in developing those parts of theoretical physics of interest to industry, and has taken a large part in the well-known Bristol ‘summer schools'; his knowledge of nuclear physics, also, makes him particularly fitted to collaborate with the group at Liverpool working under Sir James Chadwick.

Guthrie Lecture of the Physical Society

THE Guthrie Lecture of the Physical Society will be given this year by Sir George Thomson, his subject being "The Growth of Crystals". The Lecture will be given on June 4 at the Science Museum, London, S.W.7, at 5 p.m. During the First World War, Prof. Thomson made notable contributions to aerodynamics ; later his attention was directed to the demonstration of the wave nature of the electron and the proof of de Brogue‘s Law. These experiments, now classical, earned him the Nobel Prize in 1937. After his appointment to the chair of physics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, the work on electron diffraction in particular was continued and led naturally to an interest in surface layers and to the general question of crystal structure. During the Second World War, Sir George Thomson held a number of important Government posts and more recently was the British delegate to the Atomic Energy Commission of the United Nations Organisation.

Prof. Alexander Ogg

FOR more than forty years Alexander Ogg, who died on February 23, had been by common consent the much-loved leader in his subject of physics in South Africa. A Scotsman by birth, he graduated in the University of Aberdeen under Prof. Kiven and afterwards obtained his doctorate as an 1851 Exhibitioner under iSTernst in Göttingen. His interest in thermodynamics arose during this period, and led to his well-known English translation of Planck‘s classic work on the subject. After this, he was for a time a lecturer at Aberdeen, which he left to become a master in the Royal Naval Engineering College, Devonport. In 1905 he migrated to South Africa to be the first occupant of the chair of physics and applied mathematics at Rhodes University College, Grahamstown. In so doing he became by no means the least illustrious of that band of Scottish teachers who have contributed so much to South Africa.

Theoretical Physics at Manchester: Prof. L. Rosenfeld

Dr. Leon Rosenfeld has now taken up the position, to which he was recently appointed, of professor of theoretical physics in the University of Manchester in succession to Prof. D. R. Hartree. Prof. Rosenfeld was born in 1904 in Liège, graduating there in 1926. He then spent a year in Paris at the École Normale Superieure, during which he worked with Prof. Louis de Broglie. His first published work, on five-dimensional relativity, appeared about this time. In 1927 he went as assistant to Prof. Max Born in Göttingen, and while there worked on problems of optical activity and the Faraday effect; then to Zurich with Prof. Pauli, where he studied quantum electrodynamics. In 1931 he became a teacher in the School of Electrical Engineering at Liège. From 1930 until 1940 he worked in very close collaboration with Prof. Niels Bohr, spending a considerable part of each year in Copenhagen. In 1935 he was elected to the chair of theoretical physics at Liège, and in 1940 moved to a similar chair at Utrecht in Holland. Prof. Rosenfeld is one of the leading theoretical physicists of to-day and is distinguished not only for his great original contributions to the most difficult and deep parts of modern quantum mechanics and nuclear structure, but also for his wide knowledge and scholarship. He is now completing a book on the quantum theory of nuclear forces which should prove valuable to all theoretical workers on nuclear structure. In his new position in Manchester he will add greatly to the strength of theoretical physics in England. He will be in very close touch with the experimental researches being carried out in the laboratory of Prof. P. M. S. Blackett.

Die Geschichte der Atombombe

PROF. THIRRING was dismissed from the chair of theoretical physics in the University of Vienna by the Nazis because of his democratic views and his association with anti-militaristic movements, was persecuted by the Gestapo, and was reinstated only after the downfall of the Nazi regime. The author certainly is well qualified politically to interpret the significance of atomic energy in a popular book to a German-speaking public. The reviewer considers that Thirring has admirably succeeded in the task he has set himself. The book provides an elementary introduction to the structure of the atom and the nucleus, a history of the attempts in the Allied countries (on the basis of the Smyth Report) and in Germany to make use of atomic fission, and a short evaluation of the political aspects of atomic energy. The book is written in a clear and fresh style enlivened by sarcastic remarks against the treatment of science under Nazism. Die Geschichte der Atombombe Mit einer elementaren Einführung in die Atomphysik auf Grund der Originalliteratur gemeinserständlich dargestellt. Von Hans Thirring. (Wissenschaft für Jedermann.) Pp. 150. (Wien : Neues Österreich Zeitungs- und Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H., 1946.) n.p.