Houtermans, Friedrich Georg

Born Zoppot near Danzig, (Gdańsk, Poland), 22 January 1903

Died Bern, Switzerland, 1 March 1966

German experimental physicist Friedrich (Fritz) Houtermans is known within astronomy almost exclusively for a single theoretical idea, that it should be possible to build helium from hydrogen in stars and so provide stellar energy via a catalytic cycle using some heavier elements. His colleague in this endeavor was the somewhat younger British astrophysicist Robert Atkinson .

Houtermans was raised in Vienna (and frequently taken to be a native) by his mother, Elsa Houtermans, the first woman in Vienna to earn a doctorate in chemistry. He began physics studies at Göttingen in 1921, receiving his Ph.D. in 1927 for work with James Franck on resonant fluorescence in mercury. George Gamow arrived in Göttingen the next year, and they collaborated on an extension of Gamow’s theory of alpha decay of elements like uranium and thorium, which involved quantum mechanical tunneling or barrier...