Paul Scherrer

Today is the birthday of physicist Paul Scherrer, who was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1890. He enrolled at ETH Zurich intending to study botany but switched to mathematics and physics; in 1916 he earned a PhD from the University of Göttingen in Germany. During his graduate studies Scherrer codiscovered a technique for analyzing the structure of crystals with x rays. Scherrer became a professor at ETH Zurich and organized the first international physics conference to be held after World War I. He helped make ETH one of the leading physics institutions by building three particle accelerators and focusing on experimental nuclear physics. Following World War II Scherrer was named president of the Swiss Study Commission on Atomic Energy and the Swiss Commission for Atomic Sciences. He was instrumental in attracting CERN to set up its headquarters in Geneva. And his lectures were legendary, wrote Hans Frauenfelder and Rolf Steffen in their Physics Today obituary of Scherrer: “Rockets flew through the lecture room, crystals changed their colors, and living cats proved their knowledge of angular-momentum conservation.” Today the Paul Scherrer Institute is the largest research facility for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today collection)

Date in History: 3 February 1890