Everything about Wilhelm Wien totally explained
Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (
January 13,
1864 –
August 30,
1928) was a
German physicist who, in
1893, used theories about
heat and
electromagnetism to compose
Wien's displacement law, which relates the maximum
emission of a
blackbody to its
temperature.
As
Max von Laue wrote of Wien, "his immortal glory" was that he "led us to the very gates of
quantum physics".
Wien was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Physics for
1911. A
crater on
Mars is named in his honor.
In 1913 he was invited as an Ernest Kempton Adams Lecturer in Theoretical Physics from
Columbia University.
Early life
Wien was born at
Fischhausen (Rybaki),
Province of Prussia (now Primorsk, Russia) as the son of landowner
Carl Wien. In
1866, his family moved to
Drachstein, in
Rastenburg (Rastembork).
Education
In
1879, Wien went to school in Rastenburg and from
1880-
1882 he attended the city school of
Heidelberg. In
1882 he attended the
University of Göttingen and the
University of Berlin. From
1883-
85, he worked in the laboratory of
Hermann von Helmholtz and, in
1886, he received his
Ph.D. with a thesis on the diffraction of
light upon metals and on the influence of various materials upon the
color of refracted light.
From 1896 to 1899, Wien lectured at the prestigious
Aachen University of Technology.
In 1900 he went to the University Würzburg and became successor of
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.
Work
In 1896 Wien derived a distribution law of radiation, later named after him
Wien's displacement law. Planck, who was a colleague of Wien's when he was carrying out this work, later, in 1900, based
quantum theory on the fact that Wien's law, while valid at high frequencies, broke down completely at low frequencies. In 1900 (following the work of
George Frederick Charles Searle), he assumed that the entire mass of matter is of electromagnetic origin and proposed the formula
for the relation between electromagnetic mass and electromagnetic energy.
While studying streams of
ionized gas, Wien, in 1898, identified a positive particle equal in mass to the
hydrogen atom. Wien, with this work, laid the foundation of
mass spectroscopy.
J. J. Thomson refined Wien's apparatus and conducted further experiments in 1913 then, after work by
Ernest Rutherford in 1919, Wien's particle was accepted and named the
proton.
Wien received the 1911 Nobel Prize for his work on
heat radiation.
Bibliography
- Lehrbuch der Hydrodynamik (1900, physics)
- Aus dem Leben und Wirken eines Physikers (1930, memoir)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Wilhelm Wien'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://wilhelm_wien.totallyexplained.com">Wilhelm Wien Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
