Gunnar Nordström (12 March 1881 – 24 December 1923) was a
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
theoretical physicist best remembered for
his theory of gravitation, which was an early competitor of
general relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...
. Nordström is often designated by modern writers as ''The Einstein of Finland'' due to his novel work in similar fields with similar methods to Einstein.
[Raimo Keskinen (1981): Gunnar Nordström 1881B1923. Arkhimedes 2/1981, s. 71B84. In Finnish, excerpt http://www.tieteessatapahtuu.fi/797/KESKINEN.pdf ]
Education and career
Nordström graduated high-school from ''
Brobergska skolan'' in central Helsinki 1899. At first he went on to study
mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, and ...
, graduating in 1903 from the
Polytechnic institute in Helsinki, later renamed Helsinki University of Technology and today a part of the
Aalto University
Aalto University ( fi, Aalto-yliopisto; sv, Aalto-universitetet) is a public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the He ...
. During his studies he developed an interest for more theoretical subjects, proceeding after graduation to further study for a master's degree in natural science, mathematics and economy at the
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the ...
(1903–1907).
Nordström then moved to
Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...
, Germany, where he had been recommended to go to study physical chemistry. However, he soon lost interest in the intended field and moved to study electrodynamics, a field the
University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...
was renowned for at the time.
He returned to Finland to complete his doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki in 1910, and become a
docent
The title of docent is conferred by some European universities to denote a specific academic appointment within a set structure of academic ranks at or below the full professor rank, similar to a British readership, a French " ''maître de conf ...
at the university. Subsequently, he became fascinated with the very novel and soon burgeoning field of gravitation and wanted to move to the
Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
where scientists with contributions to that fields such as
Hendrik Lorentz,
Paul Ehrenfest
Paul Ehrenfest (18 January 1880 – 25 September 1933) was an Austrian theoretical physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition a ...
and
Willem de Sitter were active. Nordström was able to move to
Leiden
Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...
in 1916 to work under Ehrenfest, in the midst of the First World War, due to his Russian passport. Nordström spent considerable time in Leiden where he met a Dutch physics student, Cornelia van Leeuwen, with whom he went on to have several children.
[ (I have chosen to use this source when conflicting information was available in less official sources, mainly regarding graduation years)] After the war he declined a professorship at the
University of Berlin
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
, a post awarded instead to
Max Born
Max Born (; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a n ...
, in order to return to Finland in 1918 and hold at first the professorship of physics and later the professorship of mechanics at the
Helsinki University of Technology
Helsinki University of Technology (TKK; fi, Teknillinen korkeakoulu; sv, Tekniska högskolan) was a technical university in Finland. It was located in Otaniemi, Espoo in the metropolitan area of Greater Helsinki. The university was founded in ...
.
One of the keys to Nordström's success as a scientist was his ability to learn to apply
differential geometry
Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...
to physics, a new approach that also would eventually lead
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
to the theory of general relativity. Few other scientists of the time in the world were able to make effective use of this new analytical tool, with the notable exception of
Ernst Lindelöf
Ernst is both a surname and a given name, the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian form of Ernest. Notable people with the name include:
Surname
* Adolf Ernst (1832–1899) German botanist known by the author abbreviation "Ernst"
* Anton Ernst (1975- ...
.
Contributions to theory
During his time in Leiden, Nordström solved Einstein's field equations outside a spherically symmetric charged body. The solution was also found by
Hans Reissner
Hans Jacob Reissner, also known as Jacob Johannes Reissner (18 January 1874, Berlin – 2 October 1967, Mt. Angel, Oregon), was a German aeronautical engineer whose avocation was mathematical physics. During World War I he was awarded the Iron C ...
,
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 assoc ...
and
George Barker Jeffery
George Barker Jeffery FRS (9 May 1891 – 27 April 1957) was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. He is probably best known to the scientifically literate public as the translator of papers by Albert Einstein, Hendri ...
,
and it is nowadays known as the
Reissner–Nordström metric
In physics and astronomy, the Reissner–Nordström metric is a static solution to the Einstein–Maxwell field equations, which corresponds to the gravitational field of a charged, non-rotating, spherically symmetric body of mass ''M''. T ...
. Nordström maintained frequent contact with many of the other great physicists of the era, including
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 Albert Einstein. For example, it was Bohr's contributions that helped Nordström to circumvent the Russian censorship of German post to Finland,
which at the time was a grand duchy in
personal union
A personal union is the combination of two or more states that have the same monarch while their boundaries, laws, and interests remain distinct. A real union, by contrast, would involve the constituent states being to some extent interlink ...
with the Russian Empire.
The theory for which Nordström was arguably most famous in his own lifetime,
his theory of gravitation, was for a long time considered as a competitor to Einstein's theory of
general relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...
, which was published in 1915, after Nordström's theory. In 1914 Nordström introduced an additional space dimension to his theory, which provided coupling to
electromagnetism
In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions of a ...
. This was the first of the
extra dimensional theories, which later came to be known as
Kaluza–Klein theory. Kaluza and Klein, whose names are commonly used today for the theory, did not publish their work until the 1920s. Some speculations as to why Nordström's contribution fell into obscurity are that his theory was partly published in Swedish and that Einstein in a later publication referenced to Kaluza alone.
Today extra dimensions and theories thereof are widely researched, debated and even looked for experimentally.
Nordström's theory of gravitation was subsequently experimentally found to be inferior to Einstein's, as it did not predict the bending of light which was observed during the
solar eclipse in 1919.
However, Nordström and Einstein were in friendly competition or by some measure even cooperating scientists, not rivals. This can be seen from Nordström's public admiration of Einstein's work, as demonstrated by the two occasions on which Nordström nominated Einstein for the
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
in physics for his theory of relativity.
Einstein never received the Nobel prize for the theory, as the first experimental evidence presented in 1919 could at the time still be disputed and there was not yet a consensus or even general understanding in the scientific community of the complex mathematical models that Einstein, Nordström and others had developed. Nordström's scalar theory is today mainly used as a pedagogical tool when learning general relativity.
Today, there is limited public knowledge of Nordström's contributions to science, even in Finland.
However, after his death a number of Finnish physicists and mathematicians devoted their time to the theory of relativity and differential geometry, presumably due to the legacy he left. On the other hand, the most notable opponent of general relativity in the Finnish scientific world was
Hjalmar Mellin
Robert Hjalmar Mellin (19 June 1854 – 5 April 1933) was a Finnish mathematician and function theorist.
Biography
Mellin studied at the University of Helsinki and later in Berlin under Karl Weierstrass. He is chiefly remembered as the develope ...
, the previous rector of the Helsinki University of Technology where Nordström held professorship.
Personal life
At the outbreak of
WWI
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, Nordström moved to the Netherlands, where he met and married his wife Cornelia van Leeuwen. They moved back to Finland in 1918.
Death
Nordström died in December 1923, at the age of 42, from
pernicious anemia
Pernicious anemia is a type of vitamin B12 deficiency anemia, a disease in which not enough red blood cells are produced due to the malabsorption of vitamin B12. Malabsorption in pernicious anemia results from the lack or loss of intrinsic fa ...
. The illness was perhaps caused by exposure to
radioactive
Radioactive decay (also known as nuclear decay, radioactivity, radioactive disintegration, or nuclear disintegration) is the process by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy by radiation. A material containing unstable nuclei is consid ...
substances. Nordström was known for experimenting with radioactive substances
and for enjoying the
Finnish sauna
The Finnish sauna ( sv, bastu) is a substantial part of Finnish and Estonian culture.
It was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists at the December 17, 2020 meeting of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguardi ...
tradition using water from a spring rich in
radium
Radium is a chemical element with the symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen (rather t ...
.
[Totuuden nimessä: Kaksitoista merkittävää Suomen Tiedeseuran jäsentä (''In the name of truth: twelve important members of the Finnish society of science''), pages 173–176] Among his publications there is one from 1913 regarding the measurement of the ''radioactive emancipation power'' of different springs and ground waters in Finland.
Selected publications
During Nordström's career he published 34 articles and research papers in languages including German, Dutch, Finnish, and his mother-tongue Swedish. Nordström is probably the first person to write about the theory of relativity in the languages of Finland.
*''Die Energiegleichung für das elektromagnetische Feld bewegter Körper'', 1908, Doctoral dissertation
*''Rum och tid enligt Einstein och Minkowski'', 1909, published in a series of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters: Öfversigt af Finska Vetenskaps-Societetens Förhandlingar
*''Relativitätsprinzip und Gravitation'', 1912, in Physikalische Zeitschrift
*''Träge und Schwere Masse in der Relativitätsmechanik'', 1913, in Annalen der Physik
*''Über die Möglichkeit, das Elektromagnetische Feld und das Gravitationsfeld zu vereiningen'', 1914, in Physikalische Zeitschrift
*''Zur Elektrizitäts- und Gravitationstheorie'', 1914, in the series Öfversigt
*''Über eine mögliche Grundlage einer Theorie der Materie'', 1915, in the series Öfversigt
*''Een en ander over de energie van het zwaarte krachtsveld volgens de theorie van Einstein'', 1918
See also
*
Nordström's theory of gravitation
In theoretical physics, Nordström's theory of gravitation was a predecessor of general relativity. Strictly speaking, there were actually ''two'' distinct theories proposed by the Finnish theoretical physicist Gunnar Nordström, in 1912 and 1913 ...
Notes
References
* Offers some historical information regarding Nordström's contributions to physics.
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nordstrom, Gunnar
Relativity theorists
1881 births
1923 deaths
20th-century Finnish physicists
Swedish-speaking Finns