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.