Wilhelm Wien

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Wilhelm Wien
RWTH Aachen
Doctoral advisorHermann von Helmholtz
Doctoral studentsGabriel Holtsmark
Eduard Rüchardt

Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (German pronunciation:

blackbody
at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.

He also formulated an expression for the black-body radiation, which is correct in the

heat radiation
.

He was a cousin of Max Wien, inventor of the Wien bridge.

Biography

Early years

Wien was born at Gaffken (now in Baltiysky District) near Fischhausen in the Province of Prussia as the son of landowner Carl Wien. In 1866, his family moved to Drachenstein near Rastenburg (now Kętrzyn, Poland).

In 1879, Wien went to school in Rastenburg and from 1880 to 1882 he attended the city school of

University of Munich. Wien was very active in science politics representing conservative and nationalistic positions though being not as extreme as sharing the attitude of those going to develop the "Deutsche Physik". He appreciated both Albert Einstein and relativity.[1]

Career

In 1896 Wien empirically determined a distribution law of

Wien–Planck law. However, Wien's law was only valid at high frequencies, and underestimated the radiancy at low frequencies. Planck corrected the theory and proposed what is now called Planck's law, which led to the development of quantum theory
. However, Wien's other empirical formulation , called Wien's displacement law, is still very useful, as it relates the peak wavelength emitted by a body (λmax), to the temperature of the body (T). 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.

Wien developed the Wien filter (also known as velocity selector) in 1898 for the study of anode rays. It is a device consisting of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields that can be used as a velocity filter for charged particles, for example in electron microscopes and spectrometers. It is used in accelerator mass spectrometry to select particles based on their speed. The device is composed of orthogonal electric and magnetic fields, such that particles with the correct speed will be unaffected while other particles will be deflected. It can be configured as a charged particle energy analyzer, monochromator, or mass spectrometer.

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 spectrometry. 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
.

In 1911, Wien was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat".[3] He delivered the Ernest Kempton Adams Lecture at Columbia University in 1913.[4]

See also

Publications

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Wilhelm Wien

References
  1. ^ Wolff, Stefan L. (30 July 2017). "Physiker im "Krieg der Geister"" (PDF).
  2. ^ Kragh, H. (2002). Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century.
    ISBN 978-0-691-09552-3
    .
  3. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1911".
    The Nobel Foundation
    . Retrieved 9 August 2014.
  4. ^ "EKA Lecture Series Returns, Bringing International Quantum Science to Columbia for More Than a Century | Department of Physics". www.physics.columbia.edu. Retrieved 28 May 2023.

External links

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