Prof Reinhold Heinrich (Henry) Furth (20 October 1893 – 17 July 1979) was a German-speaking physicist born in Prague, noted for his 1951
BAAS
Baas:
*An Afrikaans word for boss and Dutch word for supervisor/leader/master, from which the American word "boss" is derived.
Surname
* Balduin Baas (1922–2006), German actor
* David Baas (born 1981), American football center
* Gilberto Keb Baa ...
lecture Physics and Social Equilibrium. He is also remembered for his 1934 theory that stars are composed of
Antiparticles
In particle physics, every type of particle is associated with an antiparticle with the same mass but with opposite physical charges (such as electric charge). For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positron (also known as an antie ...
.
He edited the collected papers of
Albert Einstein on the ''Theory of Brownian Movement''.
Life
He was born in
Prague (then
Austria-Hungary) on 20 October 1893 and was educated there at the Austrian State Gymnasium. He then attended the
German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague gaining a doctorate (PhD) in 1916. From 1931 to 1938 he was Professor of Experimental Physics at the German University in Prague. Shortly before the outbreak of the
Second World War he moved to
Scotland, becoming a Research Fellow at the
University of Edinburgh.
In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...
. His proposers were
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 ...
,
Robert Schlapp
Robert Schlapp FRSE (18 July 1899 – 31 May 1991) was a 20th century British physicist and mathematician of German descent. He was affectionately known as Robin Schlapp.
Life
He was born in Edinburgh on 18 July 1899, the youngest of three ch ...
,
Ivor Etherington
Ivor Malcolm Haddon Etherington FRSE (8 February 1908 -1 January 1994) was a mathematician who worked initially on general relativity, and later on genetics and introduced genetic algebras.
Life
He was born in Lewisham in London the son of Annie ...
, and
James Pickering Kendall.
In 1965 he won the Society’s
Keith Medal. In Edinburgh he lived at 60 Grange Loan. In 1947 he left Edinburgh to become a Reader in Theoretical Physics at
Birkbeck College
Birkbeck, University of London (formally Birkbeck College, University of London), is a public university, public research university, located in Bloomsbury, London, England, and a constituent college, member institution of the federal Universit ...
in
London.
He died in
Chislehurst
Chislehurst () is a suburban district of south-east London, England, in the London Borough of Bromley. It lies east of Bromley, south-west of Sidcup and north-west of Orpington, south-east of Charing Cross. Before the creation of Greater L ...
in
London on 17 July 1979.
Publications
*
Albert Einstein: ''Investigations on the Theory of Brownian Movement'' (1922) edited by R. Fürth
*''Dynamic Theory of Gases'' (1926) with
James Jeans
*''On the Theory of Stochastic Phenomena and its Application to some Problems of Cosmic Physics'' (1956)
*''Fundamental Problems of Modern Theoretical Physics'' (1970)
*''The Philosophy of
Niels Bohr'' (1958)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Furth, Reinhold Henry
1893 births
1979 deaths
Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Scientists from Prague
Czech physicists
20th-century non-fiction writers
Czechoslovak emigrants to the United Kingdom