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This biography provides a stimulating and coherent blend of scientific and personal narratives describing the many achievements of the theoretical physicist Herbert Fröhlich. For more than half a century, Fröhlich was an internationally renowned and much respected figure who exerted a decisive influence, often as a ‘man ahead of his time’, in fields as diverse as meson theory and biology. Although best known for his contributions to the theory of dielectrics and superconductivity, he worked in many other fields, his most important legacy being the pioneering introduction quantum field-theoretical methods into condensed matter physics in 1952, which revolutionised the subsequent development of the subject. Gerard Hyland has written an absorbing and informative account, in which Herbert Fröhlich’s magnetic personality shines through.
On three occasions and at different locations, conferences were held to honor the eightieth birthday of Professor Herbert Frohlich: on the 18th December, 1985, in Liverpool, England; on the 14th February, 1986, in Stuttgart, Germany; and on the 8th March, 1986, on the Palm Coast, Florida. This Festschrift is a compilation of the papers of those conferences. Frohlich's choice of problems, from the earliest days, was couched in the phy sics of intrinsically interacting systems of excitation. One example, in which he set the course of research which is still followed, concerned dielectric breakdown, developed from the 1930's over several decades. The interacting systems are the electrons (receiving energy from an electric field) and lattice atom motion (taking energy from the electrons via "electron-phonon" interaction, hence heat dissipa tion). There is a threshold field above which the latter cannot keep up with the former, and the combined system (electrons plus phonons) "runs away"; that is to say, collectively it switches to a new state.
This edition of the private and scientific correspondence of Sir Rudolf Peierls gives a unique insight into the life and work of one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century. Rudolf Peierls'' scientific work contributed to the early developments in quantum mechanics, and he is well known and much appreciated for his contributions to various disciplines, including solid state physics, nuclear physics, and particle physics. As an enthusiastic and devoted teacher, he passed on his knowledge and understanding and inspired the work of collaborators and students alike. As an effective administrator he was responsible, almost single-handedly, for the establishment of an outstanding successful centre of theoretical physics in Birmingham, and later contributed much to theoretical physics in Oxford.
This edition of the private and scientific correspondence of Sir Rudolf Peierls gives a unique insight into the life and work of one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century. Rudolf Peierls' scientific work contributed to the early developments in quantum mechanics, and he is well known and much appreciated for his contributions to various disciplines, including solid state physics, nuclear physics, and particle physics. As an enthusiastic and devoted teacher, he passed on his knowledge and understanding and inspired the work of collaborators and students alike. As an effective administrator he was responsible, almost single-handedly, for the establishment of an outstanding...
The study of cooperative phenomena is one of the dominant features of contem porary physics. Outside physics it has grown to a huge field of interdisciplinary investigation, involving all the natural sciences from physics via biology to socio logy. Yet, during the first few decades following the advent of quantum theory, the pursuit of the single particle or the single atom, as the case may be, has been so fascinating that only a small number of physicists have stressed the importance of collective behaviour. One outstanding personality among these few is Professor HERBERT FROHLICH. He has made an enormous contribution to the modern concept of cooperativity and has stimulated a whole generat...
The book of Erwin Schrödinger about life evokes a variety of basic questions concerning the understanding of life in terms of modern physics rather than biochemistry. Problems of organization and regulation of biological systems cannot be understood by revealing only the chemical processes of the living state. A group of reputable physicists — among them the followers of Heisenberg and Fröhlich — and biologists came to this same conclusion through several workshops on this topic. This book contains their contributions, written from different viewpoints of theoretical physics and modern biology. These articles are valuable not only for understanding life, but also for creating new and non-invasive diagnostic and therapeutic tools in medicine; they also contribute importantly to a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes, including the development of consciousness.
Christoph Laucht offers the first investigation into the roles played by two German-born emigre atomic scientists, Klaus Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls, in the development of British nuclear culture, especially the practice of nuclear science and the political implications of the atomic scientists' work, from the start of the Second World War until 1959.