Walther Gerlach


Walther Gerlach was a German physicist who co-discovered spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect.

Education

Gerlach was born in Biebrich, Hessen-Nassau, German Empire, as son of Dr. med. Valentin Gerlach and his wife Marie Niederhaeuser.
He studied at the University of Tübingen from 1908, and received his doctorate in 1912, under Friedrich Paschen. The subject of his dissertation was on the measurement of radiation. After obtaining his doctorate, he continued on as an assistant to Paschen, which he had been since 1911. Gerlach completed his Habilitation at Tübingen in 1916, while serving during World War I.

Career

From 1915 to 1918, during the war, Gerlach did service with the German Army. He worked on wireless telegraphy at Jena under Max Wien. He also served in the Artillerie-Prüfungskommission under Rudolf Ladenburg.
Gerlach became a Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen in 1916. A year later, he became a Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen. From 1919 to 1920, he was the head of a physics laboratory of Farbenfabriken Elberfeld, later Bayer-Werke A.G.
In 1921, he became a.o. professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. It was before 17. Feb.1922 that Gerlach succeeded with the experiment on spin quantization in a magnetic field, later and wrongly called the Stern–Gerlach effect. The below two lines on Hentschel seem to be a bibliographical notice. Permit me to continue as follows:
In "Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste", Reden und Gedenkworte, vol. 16, 1980, Verlag Lambert Schneider in Heidelberg, pp. 47-53, physicist Wolfgang Gentner, evidently a close friend of Gerlach, points out that it was Gerlach who had by himself- given his extraordinary gift for experimenting - after Otto Stern had already in 1921 left for Rostock, where he had been given a professorship-
successfully carried out the Experiment in Frankfurt before 17. Feb 1922. On this day the "critical theorist" Wolfgang Pauli sent Gerlach a postcard with congratulations and the remark. "Jetzt wird hoffentlich auch der ungläubige Stern von der Richtungsquantelung überzeugt sein". This clearly hints at Stern's reservatio mentalis and the Experiment could also and fully justified be called the "Gerlach-Experiment".
Otto Stern was among the nominees for the physics Nobel Prize in 1943 and was awarded the prize on 9 November 1944. The citation did not mention the highly important Stern-Gerlach experiment which Walther Gerlach finally carried out successfully early in 1922 during the Weimar Republic in the absence of Otto Stern who had already moved on to Rostock, thus withholding the honour from Gerlach in view of his continued activity in "Nazi-led" Germany at the end of the war. .
In 1925, Gerlach took a call and became an ordinarius professor at the University of Tübingen, successor to Friedrich Paschen. In 1929, he took a call and became ordinarius professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, successor to Wilhelm Wien. He held this position until May 1945, when he was arrested by the American and British Armed Forces.
From 1937 until 1945, Gerlach was a member of the supervisory board of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. After 1946, he continued to be an influential official in its successor organization after World War II, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
On 1 January 1944, Gerlach officially became head of the physics section of the Reichsforschungsrat and Bevollmächtigter of nuclear physics, replacing Abraham Esau. In April of that year, he founded the Reichsberichte für Physik, which were official reports appearing as supplements to the Physikalische Zeitschrift.
From May 1945, Gerlach was interned in France and Belgium by British and American Armed Forces under Operation Alsos. From July of that year to January 1946, he was interned in England at Farm Hall under Operation Epsilon, which interned 10 German scientists who were thought to have participated in the development of atomic weapons.
Upon Gerlach's return to Germany in 1946, he became a visiting professor at the University of Bonn. From 1948, he became an ordinarius professor of experimental physics and director of the physics department at the University of Munich, a position he held until 1957. He was also rector of the university from 1948 to 1951.
From 1949 to 1951, Gerlach was the founding president of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, which promotes applied sciences. From 1949 to 1961, he was the vice-president of the Deutsche Gemeinschaft zur Erhaltung und Förderung der Forschung ; also known in short as the Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft, previously the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft.
In 1957, Gerlach was a co-signer of the Göttingen Manifesto, which was against rearming the Federal Republic of Germany with atomic weapons.

Other positions / Decorations / Honours

He died in Munich in 1979.

literature

Rest of my insert which your system had no more room for:
The "theoretician" Wolfgang Pauli had sent Gerlach a postcard on 17 Feb. 1922 with his congratulations and the remark "Jetzt wird hoffentlich
auch der ungläubige Stern von der Richtungsquantelung überzeugt sein". Gerlach was considered risky, having at the end of the war been active in the Reichsrüstungsrat and the Uran Projekt of the Nazi regime. He would have been the right choice.