Arthur Erich Haas, Ph.D.

Birth record https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000141941586886

Residence: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSYS-RD9Z?i=151&ca...

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Erich_Haas

Haas, Arthur Erich Born Brno, Czech Republic, 30 April 1884 Died Chicago, USA, 20 February 1941 Austrian-American physicist Arthur Erich Haas made contributions to atomic and quantum theory, and he was also a pioneer in the historical study of the physical sciences. Since the late 1920s he engaged in theoretical work on cosmology and astrophysics, arguing that the expanding universe is finite in both space and time. The oldest son of Gustav Haas, a lawyer, Arthur Haas grew up in Brno, Moravia, which at the time was part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. In 1924 he married Emma Beatrice Huber, with whom he had two sons. He studied at the universities in Vienna and Göttingen, and in 1906 he received his doctorate from the University of Vienna, his dissertation being on ancient theories of light. His postgraduate studies included atomic theory as well as history and philosophy of science, which in 1909 resulted in an important monograph on the history of the principle of energy conservation. The following year he proposed for the first time an atomic model incorporating Planck’s constant of action. On the basis of his model for the hydrogen atom he derived an expression for the Rydberg constant in terms of elementary constants, of the same kind as the one Niels Bohr presented three years later. However, while Bohr argued that Planck’s constant was irreducible, Haas expressed it in terms of the mass and radius of the hydrogen atom. Having been appointed professor of history of science at Leipzig in 1913, he gave courses in theoretical physics and published in 1919 a widely used textbook, Einführung in die theoretische Physik (English translation 1925). In 1920 he developed a theory of the isotope shift in band spectra similar to the one that independently was proposed by Adolf Kratzer in Germany and Francis Wheeler Loomis in the United States. From 1923 to 1935 he was professor at the University of Vienna, during which period he 8
wrote several textbooks, including an introduction to wave mechanics (1928) and the first book on quantum chemistry (1929). In 1935 he emigrated with his family to the United States, where he first stayed as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College, Maine. With the support of Albert Einstein, the next year he joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. He remained at Notre Dame until his death in 1941. Among other activities, in 1938 he organized an important meeting on “The Physics of the Universe and the Nature of Primordial Particles,” one of the very first conferences on physical cosmology. In this meeting participated, among others, Harlow Shapley, Arthur Holly Compton, Georges Édouard Lemaître, and Carl David Anderson. Haas’ interest in cosmological questions was in part of a philosophical and theological nature, as shown by papers of 1907 and 1911 in which he argued that an eternal universe was inconsistent with the laws of physics. He based the conclusion not only on the second law of thermodynamics but also on the finite life-times of radioactive elements. This was the first time radioactivity was considered in a cosmological context. Much later, and especially after he had settled in the United States, cosmology became his main area of research. In a book of 1934, Kosmologische Probleme der Physik, he gave one of the first introductions to the new relativistic cosmology of the expanding universe. In part inspired by the ideas of Arthur Stanley Eddington, he suggested various relations between atomic and cosmic constants of nature, including an expression of the mass of the universe in terms Hubble’s expansion constant and the classical electron radius. Like Lemaître, he always insisted that the universe must be spatially finite, and in 1938 he suggested that its total energy might be zero, meaning that the positive mass-energy was compensated for by its negative gravitational energy. This idea was later taken up by other cosmologists, including Pascual Jordan and Charles W. Misner. Haas was a Catholic, and in a paper of 1938 he addressed the spiritual meaning of cosmology and its relationship to theism. He considered the closed finite-age universe to be consistent with his Christian belief, while he argued that it was inconsistent with atheism. Although he welcomed Lemaître’s “primeval atom” universe – the first version of what came to be known as big bang models – he also stressed that the origin of the universe is a unique process that cannot be understood from the standpoint of physics. Bibliography Guth, Eugene. “Arthur Erich Haas, 1884-1941.” American Journal of Physics 9 (1941): 198. Hermann, Armin. “Arthur Erich Haas – eine Biographie.” In Arthur Erich Haas, Der erste Quantenansatz für das Atom. Editor A. Hermann, 7-25. Stuttgart: Ernst Battenberg Verlag, 1965. Hermann, Armin. The Genesis of Quantum Theory, 1899-1913. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Kragh, Helge. Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology. London: Imperial College Press, 2004.

En janvier 1917, Arthur Haas a proposé la candidature d'Albert Einstein au prix Nobel de physique.