Frederick Seitz

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Frederick Seitz bigraphy, stories - American physicist

Frederick Seitz : biography

04 July 1911 – 02 March 2008

Frederick Seitz (July 4, 1911 – March 2, 2008) was an American physicist and a pioneer of solid state physics. In 1979, Fred Seitz was hired by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, makers of Camel cigarettes, to head their Medical Research Committee. In this position, Seitz was in charge of the campaign to smudge the facts regarding the harmful effects of tobacco. Seitz directed $6.3 million to researchers who consistently found no evidence conclusively linking tobacco to serious medical problems. Seitz was president of Rockefeller University, and president of the United States National Academy of Sciences 1962–1969. The National Academy of Sciences then disassociated itself from Seitz in 1998 when Seitz headed up a report designed to look like an NAS journal article saying that carbon dioxide poses no threat to climate. The report, which was supposedly signed by 15,000 scientists, advocated the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol. The report was not peer-reviewed. The NAS went to unusual lengths to publicly distance itself from Seitz’ article. Seitz was the recipient of the National Medal of Science, NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Award, and several other honors. He founded the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and several other material research laboratories across the United States. Seitz was also the founding chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a tobacco industry consultant and a prominent skeptic on the issue of global warming.

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Books

  • Frederick Seitz, , Princeton University, 1934
  • Frederick Seitz, , McGraw-Hill, 1940
  • Frederick Seitz, , McGraw-Hill, 1943
  • Frederick Seitz, David Turnbull, A. A. Maradudin, E. W. Montroll, G. H. Weiss, , New York, 1971
  • Robert Jastrow, William Aaron Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz, , George C. Marshall Institute, 1990
  • Robert Jastrow, William Aaron Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz, , Marshall Press, 1990
  • Frederick Seitz, , National Academy Press, 1991
  • Frederick Seitz, On the Frontier, My Life in Science (American Institute of Physics, 1994)
  • Nikolaus Riehl and Frederick Seitz, Stalin’s Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb (American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, 1996) ISBN 0-8412-3310-1.
This book is a translation of Nikolaus Riehl’s book Zehn Jahre im goldenen Käfig (Ten Years in a Golden Cage) (Riederer-Verlag, 1988); but Seitz wrote a lengthy introduction. It contains 58 photographs.
  • Frederick Seitz and Norman G. Einspruch, , University of Illinois Press, 1998.
  • Frederick Seitz, , Springer, 1998.
  • Frederick Seitz, , American Philosophical Society, 1999
  • Henry Ehrenreich, Frederick Seitz, David Turnbull, Frans Spaepen, , Academic Press, 2006
  • Frederick Seitz, , University Press of America, 2007.

Early career

Construction of a Wigner–Seitz primitive cell. Seitz moved to Princeton University to study metals under Eugene Wigner, gaining his PhD in 1934. He and Wigner pioneered one of the first quantum theories of crystals, and developed concepts in solid-state physics such as the Wigner–Seitz unit cell.

The Wigner-Seitz unit cell is a geometrical construction used in the study of crystalline material in solid-state physics. It is specific to crystals because the unique property of a crystal is that its atoms are arranged in a regular 3-dimensional array called a lattice. All the properties attributed to crystalline materials stem from this highly ordered structure. Such a structure exhibits discrete translational symmetry. In order to model and study such a periodic system, one needs a mathematical "handle" to describe the symmetry and hence draw conclusions about the material properties consequent to this symmetry. The Wigner–Seitz cell is a means to achieve this.