Carl Axel Fredrik Benedicks (27 May 1875 – 16 July 1958) was a
Swedish
Swedish or ' may refer to:
Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically:
* Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland
** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
physicist whose work included geology, mineralogy, chemistry, physics, astronomy and mathematics.
Biography
Carl Benedicks was born 27 May 1875 in
Stockholm
Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...
,
Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
to Edward Otto Benedicks and Sofia Elisabet Tholander. He married Cecilia af Geijerstam on 6 October 1899.
Benedicks was a professor at Stockholm's technical university, Director of the Institute of
Metallography
Metallography is the study of the physical structure and components of metals, by using microscopy.
Ceramic and polymeric materials may also be prepared using metallographic techniques, hence the terms ceramography, plastography and, collecti ...
, and was the first to study the
yttrium
Yttrium is a chemical element with the symbol Y and atomic number 39. It is a silvery-metallic transition metal chemically similar to the lanthanides and has often been classified as a "rare-earth element". Yttrium is almost always found in com ...
silicate
In chemistry, a silicate is any member of a family of polyatomic anions consisting of silicon and oxygen, usually with the general formula , where . The family includes orthosilicate (), metasilicate (), and pyrosilicate (, ). The name is al ...
thalenite. In 1926 Benedicks argued to the Nobel Physics Committee that
Jean Baptiste Perrin
Jean Baptiste Perrin (30 September 1870 – 17 April 1942) was a French physicist who, in his studies of the Brownian motion of minute particles suspended in liquids ( sedimentation equilibrium), verified Albert Einstein’s explanation of this ...
should receive the
Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...
for his work, over 15 years prior, on
Brownian motion
Brownian motion, or pedesis (from grc, πήδησις "leaping"), is the random motion of particles suspended in a medium (a liquid or a gas).
This pattern of motion typically consists of random fluctuations in a particle's position insi ...
, a debate which led to Perrin's eventual nomination and award. Benedicks was awarded the Carnegie Gold medal for his work on the cooling power of liquids,
quenching
In materials science, quenching is the rapid cooling of a workpiece in water, oil, polymer, air, or other fluids to obtain certain material properties. A type of heat treating, quenching prevents undesired low-temperature processes, such as pha ...
velocities, and the constituents of
troostite
Willemite is a zinc silicate mineral () and a minor ore of zinc. It is highly fluorescent (green) under shortwave ultraviolet light. It occurs in a variety of colors in daylight, in fibrous masses and apple-green gemmy masses. Troostite is a var ...
and
austenite
Austenite, also known as gamma-phase iron (γ-Fe), is a metallic, non-magnetic allotrope of iron or a solid solution of iron with an alloying element. In plain-carbon steel, austenite exists above the critical eutectoid temperature of 1000 K ...
.
Benedicks was critical of the
Copenhagen interpretation
The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, principally attributed to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It is one of the oldest of numerous proposed interpretations of quantum mechanics, as featu ...
put forward by
Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. B ...
and
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...
, saying he thought they had resigned themselves to never observing the effects of individual atoms, and that their arguments were no more than that of any pessimist.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Benedicks, Carl
20th-century Swedish physicists
1875 births
1958 deaths
Academic staff of Stockholm University
Scientists from Stockholm
Members of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala