The World of Walther Nernst: The Rise and Fall of German Science 1864-1941

Kurt Mendelssohn

Aug 2019 · Plunkett Lake Press

About this ebook

At the end of the 19th century, under the benevolent patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany became home to new scientific and technological ideas. In German universities, innovators like Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Walther Nernst revolutionized physics and chemistry with their theories of relativity, of the atomic structure and of the quanta.

Walther Nernst, a founder of physical chemistry, received the Nobel prize in 1920 for his formulation of the third law of thermodynamics. He died in 1941 in Germany, disillusioned by Hitler’s destruction of German academic life. This biography of Walther Nernst, the author’s mentor, also provides an overview of German science and technology, from its stellar rise to its rapid fall when the Nazis came to power and the vast majority of German scientists went into exile to Britain (like the author), to the United States or elsewhere to continue the tradition and spirit of the scientific revolutions started in Germany’s institutions of higher learning.

“A masterly description of the spectacular rise of German science and industry at the turn of the century and of life in Germany in the pre-1933 era.” — The Times (London)

“Mendelssohn’s... fascinating book... is a study of the rise and fall of German science as well as a life of Walther Nernst... as he shows, the ‘mad fanaticism’ of the Nazis blinded them, and blinded them completely, to the enormous scientific potential they had inherited in the laboratories of Weimar Germany.” — Roger Williams, Encounter

About the author

Born in Berlin, Kurt Mendelssohn (1906-1980) received his doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin in 1930, having studied under Max Planck, Walther Nernst, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein. As the Nazis took over, he left Germany for Great Britain in March 1933 after F. A. Lindemann invited him to join the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University. He remained at Oxford, becoming Emeritus Reader in Physics and Emeritus Professorial Fellow of Wolfson College when he retired in 1973. His work focused on low-temperature and solid state physics, especially the properties of liquid helium, which he had been the first to produce in Britain in 1933. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951. He received the Royal Society's Hughes Medal in 1967, and the Institute of Physics and Physical Society’s Simon Memorial Prize in 1968.