Johannes Stark

On this day, Johannes Stark (picture left) was born. A controversial German physicist, Stark was closely involved with the Deutsche Physik movement under the Nazis. Classed as a major offender by a denazification court, he received a four year prison sentence (later suspended) for his role in the regime. Born in Schickenhof, Kingdom of Bavaria (now Freihung), Stark studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, and crystallography at the University of Munich. His doctoral dissertation (awarded in 1897) was on “Investigation of some physical, in particular optical properties of soot”. Stark worked as the equivalent of a postdoc until 1900, when he became an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Göttingen. It was the start of a rapid career in which he published more than 300 research papers. In 1919, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his “discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields” (the latter is known as the Stark effect). From 1933 until his retirement in 1939, Stark was elected President of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, while also President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It was Stark who, as the editor of Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik, asked in 1907, then still rather obscure, Albert Einstein (pictured right) to write a review article on the principle of relativity which would have a seminal impact on physics. It was while working on this review that Einstein began a line of thought that would eventually lead to his theory of general relativity. When the Nazi’s took over Stark attempted to become the Führer of German physics through the Deutsche Physik (“German physics”) movement (along with Philipp Lenard) against the “Jewish physics” of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg (who was not Jewish). After Werner Heisenberg defended Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity Stark wrote an angry article in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, calling Heisenberg a “White Jew”. In his 1934 book Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft (“National Socialism and Science”) Stark maintained that the priority of the scientist was to serve the nation—thus, the important fields of research were those that could help German arms production and industry. He attacked theoretical physics as “Jewish” and stressed that scientific positions in Nazi Germany should only be held by pure-blooded Germans. After the war, he retired to his country estate in Upper Bavaria to study the deflection of light in an electric field. He died aged 83, on 21 June 1957. You can read his very short Physics Today obituary at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3060507

Date in History: 15 April 1874