Léon Rosenfeld

Léon Rosenfeld (1963)

Léon Rosenfeld (French: [ʁɔzɛnfɛld]; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974[1]) was a Belgian physicist and Marxist.

Rosenfeld was born into a secular Jewish family. He was a polyglot who knew eight or nine languages and was fluent in at least five of them.[2]

Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr. He did early work in quantum electrodynamics that predates by two decades the work by Dirac and Bergmann.[3] Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics.[2] Along with Frederik Belinfante, he derived the Belinfante-Rosenfeld stress-energy tensor. He also founded the journal Nuclear Physics and coined the term lepton.[4]

In 1933, Rosenfeld married Dr. Yvonne Cambresier, who was one of the first women to obtain a Physics Ph.D from a European university. They had a daughter, Andrée Rosenfeld (1934–2008) and a son, Jean Rosenfeld.[5]

In 2018 the astrophysicist and historian of science, Adam Becker, identified Rosenfeld as the principal acolyte of Bohr in suppressing any questions about or alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation.[6]

Awards and honors

Rosenfeld held chairs at multiple universities: Liège, Utrecht, Manchester, and Copenhagen.[2]

In 1949 Léon Rosenfeld was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences.[2]

References

  1. ↑ Léon Rosenfeld's Marxist defense of complementarity, by Anja Skaar Jacobsen "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Jacobsen, Anja Skaar. Léon Rosenfeld: Physics, Philosophy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century. doi:10.1142/7776.
  3. ↑ Leon Rosenfeld and the challenge of the vanishing momentum in quantum electrodynamics, by Donald Salisbury
  4. ↑ Rosenfeld, Léon (1948). Nuclear Forces. Interscience Publishers, New York, xvii.
  5. ↑ Smith, Claire. "Andree Jeanne Rosenfeld (1934-2008)". ResearchGate. Retrieved 2015-11-28.
  6. ↑ Adam Becker. What is Real? John Murray(publishers)

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