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Otto Stern Photograph Collection, approximately 1895-1969.
BANC PIC 1988.070
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Table of contents
Collection Title: Otto Stern photograph collection
Date (inclusive): approximately 1895-1969.
Collection Number: BANC PIC 1988.070
Extent:
143 photographs in 1 box and 3 oversize folders ; various sizes.
Repository: The Bancroft Library.
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
Phone: (510) 642-6481
Fax: (510) 642-7589
Email: bancref@library.berkeley.edu
URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
Languages Represented: Collection materials are in English
[Identification of item], Otto Stern photograph collection, BANC PIC 1988.070, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley
Transferred from the Otto Stern papers (BANC MSS 85/96 c).
Photographs were chiefly unidientified, but accompanied by some identifying notes made at later dates. Some of these identifications
were provided Dr. Karl von Meyenn, according to one note. Further identifications were possible by comparison, in 2015, to
duplicate or similar images made available online by the American Institute of Physics as part of their Emilio Segrè Visual
Archives.
Biography/Organization History
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.
Scope and Content Note
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.