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Otto Stern Photograph Collection, approximately 1895-1969.
BANC PIC 1988.070  
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Collection Overview
 
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Description
The collection includes portraits and snapshots of Otto Stern from childhood and throughout his career, and group portraits and snapshots with physicist colleagues and friends. Groups at international meetings of physicists and Nobel laureates, chiefly in Europe, are the subjects of many of the views, as well as group portraits of Stern and classmates early in his academic career. Group portraits at the Rome conference on nuclear physics in 1931 are included. Colleagues pictured in the collection include: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Wolfgang Pauli, E.O. Lawrence, Walther Gerlach, Peter Debye, Merle Tuve, Rudolf Ladenburg, Llewellyn H. Thomas, Alfred Landé, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Carl Runge, Gustav Hertz, Paul Ehrenfest, Robert A. Millikan, George Gamow, Paul Scherrer, Arnold Sommerfeld, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Lise Meitner, among others. Many of these colleagues are only pictured in small informal snapshots taken during conference gatherings. Several family portraits are present.
Background
Otto Stern was born in Germany, on February 17, 1888. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Breslau in 1912. In 1930 he was awarded an LL.D. by the University of California. In 1933 he moved to the United States where he was appointed a Research Professor of Physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh where he remained until 1945. His work was in the field of theoretical experimental physics, especially statistical thermodynamics and quantum theory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1943 "for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton." Stern died in 1969.
Extent
143 photographs in 1 box and 3 oversize folders ; various sizes.