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Biography of Otto SternName: Otto SternBirth Date: February 17, 1888 Death Date: August 17, 1969 Place of Birth: Sorau, Germany Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: physicist Otto Stern The German-born American physicist Otto Stern (1888-1969) discovered the atomic-and molecular-beam technique and used it to provide the first direct proof of spatial quantization.Otto Stern was born on Feb. 17, 1888, in Sorau, Upper Silesia. In 1906 he entered the University of Breslau, completing his doctoral degree in physical chemistry in 1912. He then went to the University of Prague to study under Albert Einstein and, when Einstein moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (FIT) in Zurich, Stern followed him, becoming lecturer at the FIT in 1913.The following year Stern accepted a similar position in theoretical physics at the University of Frankfurt am Main but almost immediately found himself in military service. After the war and a brief period at the University of Berlin during 1918, Stern returned to Frankfurt. There, turning from theory to experiment, he conceived and carried out the first of the atomic-and molecular-beam experiments which brought him an international …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he remained from 1933 until 1945, Stern devised a number of other experiments exploiting the atomic-and molecular-beam technique he developed. For example, he checked the accuracy of the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution for gas molecules; he measured nuclear magnetic moments and the magnetic moment of the proton; finally, he observed the wave nature of helium and hydrogen atoms by diffracting beams of these atoms.In 1945, the same year in which he retired and took up residence in Berkeley, Calif., Stern was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of a number of honors he received during his lifetime. He died in Berkeley on Aug. 17, 1969. Further Reading Stern gave an account of his experiments in his Nobel lecture, reprinted in Nobel Lectures in Physics, vol. 3 (1964). For the importance of his work in the context of the times see Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (1966). |