Assistant in Berlin

Abstract

In Berlin there was an impressive collection of scientific talents belonging to four or five different research institutions. Max Planck (1858–1947), the first to quantize the energy of the electromagnetic oscillator (1900), was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. He had been awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for Physics “in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of physics by his discovery of energy quanta”. His pupil, Max von Laue (1879–1960), had been awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize for Physics “for the discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals”. He was an outstanding figure not only as a scientist but also as a man, as we shall see later. When Max Planck retired in 1927, his successor was the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), founder of wave’s mechanics. He shared with P.A.M. Dirac the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”.