Berlin Physical Society

Planck presented his solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe at the December 1900 meeting of the Berlin Physical Society. No one grasped the implications of the breakthrough, probably not even Planck himself His equation was considered to be a nice mathematical trick, but one with no particular physical significance. 

They were both back in the laboratory when, in Wurtzburg, William Conrad Roentgen discovered a ray of great penetrating power. On January 4, 1896, he described these X-rays, as he called them, to the members of the Berlin Physical Society. And hardly had the news of the discovery of these X-rays,... 

In an obituaiy talk given at the Physical Society of Berlin in 1889, Hermann Helmholtz stressed that Clausius s strict formulation of the mechanical heat theory is one of the most surprising and interesting achievements of the old and new physics, because of the absolute generality independent of the nature of the physical body and since it establishes new, unforeseen relations between different branches of physics. 

Max Planck (1858-1947 Nobel Prize for physics 1918) at first did not have the atom in his sights. He was more interested in thermodynamics, and especially in the laws of radiation. In 1900 he surprised the Physical Society of Berlin — and later the whole world — with an experimentally based realization that changed the world view. In contrast to time and space, energy is guantized. Thus it does not form a continuum, but is essentially "grainy". The smallest unit is the Planck constant, a fundamental natural constant. 

H. Helmholtz, On the Conservation of Force (Physical Society of Berlin, Berlin, 1847)... 

Rroc. German Physical Society Conference on One-Dimensional Conductors, Saarbrlicken, Germany, 1974, ed. by H. G. Schuster (Springer, Berlin,... 

P. Bruesch, Proceedings of the German Physical Society Conference on "One-Dimensional Conductors", Univ. of Saarbrucken, July 1974, H. G. Schuster, Ed., Springer-V -lag, Berlin, to be published. 

Two further lasting changes at the Institute that date to the first days after the war were the inauguration of the so-called Haber colloquia and the promotion of affiliates of the Institute to scientific membership. Archival material regarding the early colloquia is sparse. The organizers did not leave behind a unified list of presenters and participants. However, the colloquia feature prominently in the recollections of several famous scientists and ranked with the Wednesday Physics Colloquia at Berlin University and the Friday Colloquia of the Physical Society as one of the key gathering points for physical scientists in Berlin. The biochemist David Nachmansohn remembered them as one of the most striking and valuable... 

Deputy Director of the KWI for Physics and, after Einstein gradually withdrew from the directorship in the second half of the 1920s, the de facto director of the Institute. Between 1925 and 1933 he was the theoretical adviser of the Imperial Institute for Physics and Technology in Charlottenburg, and between 1931 and 1933 the president of the German Physical Society. Apart from that, he was the soul of the Berlin Physics Colloquium, a meeting place and discussion center for Berlin physicists, which remains in place until the present day as the Max von Laue Colloquium. ... 

References D. D. Wagman, et ah, The NBS Tables of Chemical Thermodynamic Properties, in J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data, 11 2,1982 M. W. Chase, et ah, JANAF Thermochemical Tables, 3rd ed., American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Physics, 1986 (supplements to JANAF appear in J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data) Thermodynamic Research Center, TRC Thermodynamic Tables, Texas A M University, College Station, Texas I. Barin and O. Knacke, Thermochemical Properties of Inorganic Substances, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1973 J. B. Pedley, R. D. Naylor, and S. P. Kirby, Thermochemical Data of Organic Compounds, 2nd ed.. Chapman and Hall, London, 1986 V. Majer and V. Svoboda, Enthalpies of Vaporization of Organic Compounds, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, Chemical Data Series No. 32, Blackwell, Oxford, 1985. 

Sir Frederick Charles Frank (1911-1998) received his Ph.D. in 1937 from Oxford University, followed by a postdoctoral position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fiir Physik in Berlin. During World War II, Frank was involved with the British Chemical Defense Research Establishment, and because of his keen powers of observation and interpretation, he was later transferred to Scientific Intelligence at the British Air Ministry. In 1946, Frank joined the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory at the University of Bristol under its director, Nevill Mott, who encouraged him to look into problems concerned with crystal growth and the plastic deformation of metallic crystals. A stream of successes followed, establishing his scientific fame, as evidenced by many eponyms the Frank-Read source, the Frank dislocation, Frank s rule, Frank-Kasper phases. His theoretical work has been the foundation of research by innumerable scientists from around the world. Frank was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) Medal in 1946, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1954, and was knighted in 1977. 

Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Department of Chemical Physics, Faradayweg 4-6, 14195 Berlin, Germany... 

A. C. McLaren in, The Chemical Physics of Solids and their Surfaces , ed. M. W. Roberts and J. M. Thomas (Specialist Periodical Reports), The Chemical Society, London, 1978, Vol. 7, p. 1. H. R. Wenk et al., ed., Electron Microscopy in Mineralogy , Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1976. 

ProfesBor of Chemistry and Physics In the University of the City of New York) Professor of Chem istry and Toxicologry in the University of Vermont Member of the Chemical Societies of Paris and Berlin Member of the American -Chemical Society Fellow of the American Academy of Medicine of the N. Y. Academy of Medicine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, etc. 

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