Felix Bloch (23 October 1905 – 10 September 1983) was a
Swiss
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* the adjectival form of Switzerland
*Swiss people
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* Swiss, West Virginia
*Swiss, Wisconsin
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* Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports
* Swiss Internation ...
-
American
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* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
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physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and
Edward Mills Purcell
Edward Mills Purcell (August 30, 1912 – March 7, 1997) was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery (published 1946) of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear mag ...
were awarded the 1952
Nobel Prize for 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 "their development of new ways and methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements."
[Sohlman, M (Ed.) ''Nobel Foundation directory 2003.'' Vastervik, Sweden: AB CO Ekblad; 2003.] In 1954–1955, he served for one year as the first Director-General of
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...
. Felix Bloch made fundamental theoretical contributions to the understanding of
ferromagnetism
Ferromagnetism is a property of certain materials (such as iron) which results in a large observed magnetic permeability, and in many cases a large magnetic coercivity allowing the material to form a permanent magnet. Ferromagnetic materials ...
and electron behavior in
crystal lattices. He is also considered one of the developers of
nuclear magnetic resonance
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are perturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a ...
.
Biography
Early life, education, and family
Bloch was born in
Zürich
, neighboring_municipalities = Adliswil, Dübendorf, Fällanden, Kilchberg, Maur, Oberengstringen, Opfikon, Regensdorf, Rümlang, Schlieren, Stallikon, Uitikon, Urdorf, Wallisellen, Zollikon
, twintowns = Kunming, San Francisco
Z ...
, Switzerland to
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
parents Gustav and Agnes Bloch. Gustav Bloch, his father, was financially unable to attend University and worked as a wholesale grain dealer in Zürich.
Gustav moved to Zürich in 1890 to become a Swiss citizen. Their first child was a girl born in 1902 while Felix was born three years later.
Bloch entered public elementary school at the age of six and is said to have been teased, in part because he "spoke Swiss German with a somewhat different accent than most members of the class".
He received support from his older sister during much of this time, but she died at the age of twelve, devastating Felix, who is said to have lived a "depressed and isolated life" in the following years.
Bloch learned to play the piano by the age of eight and was drawn to arithmetic for its "clarity and beauty".
Bloch graduated from elementary school at twelve and enrolled in the Cantonal Gymnasium in Zürich for secondary school in 1918. He was placed on a six-year curriculum here to prepare him for University. He continued his curriculum through 1924, even through his study of engineering and physics in other schools, though it was limited to mathematics and languages after the first three years. After these first three years at the Gymnasium, at age fifteen Bloch began to study at the
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETHZ), also in Zürich. Although he initially studied engineering he soon changed to physics. During this time he attended lectures and seminars given by
Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Biography
Early life
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherland ...
and
Hermann Weyl
Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl, (; 9 November 1885 – 8 December 1955) was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland, and then Princeton, New Jersey, he is asso ...
at ETH Zürich and
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (, ; ; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist with Irish citizenship who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theo ...
at the neighboring
University of Zürich
The University of Zürich (UZH, german: Universität Zürich) is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 f ...
. A fellow student in these seminars was
John von Neumann
John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest c ...
.
Bloch graduated in 1927, and was encouraged by Debye to go to
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
to study with
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 Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematis ...
.
Bloch became Heisenberg's first graduate student, and gained his doctorate in 1928.
His doctoral thesis established the
quantum theory of solids, using waves to describe
electron
The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family,
and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have n ...
s in periodic lattices.
On March 14, 1940, Bloch married Lore Clara Misch (1911–1996), a fellow physicist working on
X-ray crystallography
X-ray crystallography is the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract into many specific directions. By measuring the angles ...
, whom he had met at an
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...
meeting.
[Former Fellows of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 – 2002](_blank)
. royalsoced.org.uk They had four children, twins George Jacob Bloch and Daniel Arthur Bloch (born January 15, 1941), son Frank Samuel Bloch (born January 16, 1945), and daughter Ruth Hedy Bloch Alexander (born September 15, 1949).
Career
Bloch remained in European academia, working on superconductivity with
Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics ...
in Zürich; with
Hans Kramers
Hendrik Anthony "Hans" Kramers (17 December 1894 – 24 April 1952) was a Dutch physicist who worked with Niels Bohr to understand how electromagnetic waves interact with matter and made important contributions to quantum mechanics and statistical ...
and
Adriaan Fokker in Holland; with Heisenberg on
ferromagnetism
Ferromagnetism is a property of certain materials (such as iron) which results in a large observed magnetic permeability, and in many cases a large magnetic coercivity allowing the material to form a permanent magnet. Ferromagnetic materials ...
, where he developed a description of boundaries between magnetic domains, now known as "
Bloch walls", and theoretically proposed a concept of
spin waves, excitations of magnetic structure; with
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 ...
in
Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan a ...
, where he worked on a theoretical description of the stopping of charged particles traveling through matter; and with
Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" an ...
in Rome.
In 1932, Bloch returned to Leipzig to assume a position as "Privatdozent" (lecturer).
In 1933, immediately after
Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
came to power, he left Germany because he was Jewish, returning to Zürich, before traveling to Paris to lecture at the
Institut Henri Poincaré
The Henri Poincaré Institute (or IHP for ''Institut Henri Poincaré'') is a mathematics research institute part of Sorbonne University, in association with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). It is located in the 5th arrond ...
.
In 1934, the chairman of
Stanford
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...
Physics invited Bloch to join the faculty.
Bloch accepted the offer and emigrated to the United States. In the fall of 1938, Bloch began working with the 37 inch cyclotron at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...
to determine the magnetic moment of the neutron. Bloch went on to become the first professor for theoretical physics at Stanford. In 1939, he became a
naturalized citizen
Naturalization (or naturalisation) is the legal act or process by which a non-citizen of a country may acquire citizenship or nationality of that country. It may be done automatically by a statute, i.e., without any effort on the part of the in ...
of the United States.
During
WWII
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, Bloch briefly worked on the
atomic bomb project at
Los Alamos. Disliking the military atmosphere of the laboratory and uninterested in the theoretical work there, Bloch left to join the
radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, Marine radar, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor v ...
project at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
.
After the war, he concentrated on investigations into nuclear induction and
nuclear magnetic resonance
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are perturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a ...
, which are the underlying principles of
MRI. In 1946 he proposed the
Bloch equations which determine the time evolution of nuclear magnetization. He was elected to the United States
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...
in 1948. Along with
Edward Purcell, Bloch was awarded the 1952
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 on nuclear magnetic induction.
When
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...
was being set up in the early 1950s, its founders were searching for someone of stature and international prestige to head the fledgling international laboratory, and in 1954 Professor Bloch became CERN's first Director-General, at the time when construction was getting under way on the present
Meyrin
Meyrin () is a municipality of the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.
The main site of CERN, the European particle physics research organisation, is in Meyrin. Meyrin was originally a small agricultural village until the 1950s, when construction of ...
site and plans for the first machines were being drawn up. After leaving CERN, he returned to
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
, where he in 1961 was made
Max Stein Professor of Physics.
In 1964, he was elected a foreign member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...
. He was also a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
and the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
.
Bloch died in Zürich in 1983.
See also
*
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 900 individuals, of whom at least 20% were Jews.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
The number of Jews receiving Nobel prizes has been the subject of some attention.*
*
*"Jews rank high among winners of Nobel, but why ...
*
List of things named after Felix Bloch
Footnotes
References
*
*
*
*
Further reading
*Bloch, F.; Staub, H
"Fission Spectrum", Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (through predecessor agency Los Alamos Scientific Lab), United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the US Atomic Energy Commission), (August 18, 1943)
External links
*
*
Oral History interview transcript with Felix Bloch on 14 May 1964, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives- interview conducted by
Thomas S. Kuhn in
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was es ...
Oral History interview transcript with Felix Bloch on 15 August 1968, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives- interview conducted by Charles Weiner at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
Oral History interview transcript with Felix Bloch 15 December 1981, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives- interview conducted by
Lillian Hoddeson at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
Felix Bloch Papers, 1931–1987(33 linear ft.) are housed in th
a
Stanford University LibrariesNational Academy of Sciences Biographical MemoirFelix Bloch Papers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bloch, Felix
1905 births
1983 deaths
Nobel laureates in Physics
Swiss Nobel laureates
American Nobel laureates
20th-century American physicists
American people of Swiss-Jewish descent
Naturalized citizens of the United States
People associated with CERN
ETH Zurich alumni
Experimental physicists
Harvard University people
Jewish American scientists
Jewish physicists
Leipzig University alumni
Manhattan Project people
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Stanford University Department of Physics faculty
Swiss Jews
Swiss physicists
Swiss emigrants to the United States
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Scientists from Zürich
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Presidents of the American Physical Society