Fritz Zwicky

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Fritz Zwicky bigraphy, stories - Swiss astronomer

Fritz Zwicky : biography

14 February 1898 – 08 February 1974

Fritz Zwicky (February 14, 1898 – February 8, 1974) was a Swiss astronomer. He worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy.

Biography

Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna, Bulgaria to a Swiss father. His father, Fridolin (b. 1868), was a prominent industrialist in the Bulgarian city and also served as ambassador of Norway in Varna (1908–1933). The Zwicky House in Varna was designed and built by Fridolin Zwicky. Fritz’s mother, Franziska Vrček (b. 1871), was an ethnic Czech of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fritz was the oldest of the Zwicky family’s three children: he had a younger brother named Rudolf and a sister called Leoni. Fritz’s mother died in Varna in 1927 and his father Fridolin remained in Bulgaria until 1945, when he returned to Switzerland. His sister Leoni married a Bulgarian from Varna and spent her entire life in the city.

In 1904, at the age of six, Fritz was sent to his grandparents in Glarus, Switzerland, "the Zwicky’s ancestral Swiss canton, to study commerce."Richard Panek, The Father of Dark Matter. Discover. pp.81-87. January 2009. His interests shifted to math and physics and he received an advanced education in mathematics and experimental physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, located in Zürich, Switzerland. In 1925, he emigrated to the United States to work with Robert Millikan at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after receiving the "international fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation."

He was responsible for positing numerous cosmological theories that have a profound impact on the understanding of our universe today. He was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Caltech in 1942 and also worked as a research director/consultant for Aerojet Engineering Corporation (1943–1961) and staff member of Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory for most of his career. He developed some of the earliest jet engines and holds over 50 patents, many in jet propulsion, and is the inventor of the Underwater Jet (TIME March 14, 1949), the Two Piece Jet Thrust Motor and Inverted Hydro Pulse.

In April 1932, Fritz Zwicky married Dorothy Vernon Gates, the daughter of a prominent local family and Senator Egbert Gates. Her money was instrumental in the funding of the Palomar Observatory during the Great Depression. Nicholas Roosevelt, cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, was his brother-in-law by marriage to Tirzah Gates. Zwicky and Dorothy divorced amicably in 1941. In 1947 Zwicky was married in Switzerland to Anna Margaritha Zurcher, and they had three daughters, Margrit, Franziska, and Barbarina. Three grandchildren were born after his death. The Zwicky Museum at the Landesbibliothek, Glarus, houses many of his papers and scientific works, and the (Foundation) in Switzerland carries on his ideas relating to "Morphological analysis". Zwicky died in Pasadena on February 8, 1974 and was buried in Mollis, Switzerland

A recent biography in English was published by the Fritz Zwicky Foundation: Alfred Stöckli & Roland Müller: Fritz Zwicky – An Extraordinary Astrophysicist. Cambridge Scientific Publishers, Cambridge, 2011. A review of the book is available from Barbarina Zwicky, Fritz Zwicky’s youngest daughter, expressly denied Alfred Stöckli and Roland Müller the use of her name or image for this book.

Scientific work

thumb Fritz Zwicky was a prolific scientist and made important contributions in many areas of astronomy.

Ionic crystals and electrolytes

His first scientific contributions pertained to ionic crystals and electrolytes.

Supernovae and neutron stars

Together with colleague Walter Baade, Zwicky pioneered and promoted the use of the first Schmidt telescopes used in a mountain-top observatory in 1935. He hand-carried the Schmidt lens from Germany, which had been polished by the optician, Bernard Schmidt. In 1934 he and Baade coined the term "supernova" and hypothesized that they were the transition of normal stars into neutron stars, as well as the origin of cosmic rays. It was a prescient insight that had tremendous impact in determining the size and age of the universe in subsequent decades.