In a pioneering experiment, von Laue beamed x-rays through a copper-sulfate crystal. With the legendary Munich experiments, von Laue, a mathematician and a physicist, solved in a single stroke two problems that had stymied researchers at the beginning of the 20th century: He clarified the nature of x-rays by showing that, like light, they were electromagnetic waves, and he opened the door for entirely new insights into the atomic structure of matter. Just prior to receiving his appointment in Zurich, this career had gained considerable momentum: In the spring of the same year, in Munich, Laue had conducted the revolutionary experiments that made him famous in the world of physics and, within two years, would bring him the Nobel Prize. Max von Laue arrived Zurich in October 1912 to commence the first professorship of his academic career. As usual, the verse can be blamed on me the calligraphy and the gouache drawing are the work of the talented Melissa Dehner.Max von Laue solved two longstanding problems with a single experiment: He clarified the nature of x-rays and laid the cornerstone for a procedure that reveals the atomic structure of matter. We thought Max von Laue’s achievement merited a clerihew. Von Laue died in a car accident in 1960 and was buried in Stadtfriedhof Cemetery in Göttingen, where no less than 8 Nobel laureates are interred, including Otto Hahn and Max Planck. Von Laue was presented his recast medal in 1950. When he came back after the War, the jar was still there, undetected by the Germans, and the gold was recovered, sent back to Stockholm, and new medals were cast from the original gold for von Laue and Franck. When the Germans invaded Denmark, George de Hevesy (a future Nobel laureate himself) dissolved von Laue’s medal (and that of James Franck) in aqua regia and left the solution openly on a shelf in Bohr’s Institute. ![]() He gave the actual gold medal to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, to protect it from Nazi confiscation. The most famous von Laue story concerns his Nobel Prize. Upon the death in 1934 of Fritz Haber, a Jewish Nobel laureate who had been forced to flee Germany, von Laue wrote an obituary praising Haber and criticizing the government that drove him out. Portrait of Max von Laue, photograph, 1929 (Wikimedia commons)ĭuring the rise of Nazism, von Laue was one of the few scientists who publicly raised his voice against the attempt to create a Nazi science. Von Laue received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery. In 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick were trying to determine the structure of DNA, the X-ray diffraction photographs of Rosalind Frankin, most notably “ Photo 51”, helped suggest the double-helix pattern of DNA. ![]() The technique came to be known as X-ray crystallography, and it would prove invaluable in many fields. The very first photograph was lacking in detail, but within a year the results were much improved, as we see with the photograph above, published in 1913. 23, 1912, two technicians in Munich did such an experiment and successfully obtained an X-ray diffraction pattern. In 1912, Laue hypothesized that if X-rays are electromagnetic waves, and if crystals have a regular lattice-like structure, then one might bounce X-rays off a crystal to produce an interference pattern that could be recorded on film, and which might contain information about the crystal structure. Max von Laue, a German physicist, was born Oct.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |