Conference tributes Einstein inspirer from Poland
If not for his untimely death Marian Smoluchowski could have had a share in three Nobel Prizes, physicist Bogdan Cichocki said Friday in Warsaw at a conference tributing the Polish kinetician who pioneered statistical physics and influenced Albert Einstein.
The conference, commemorating this year's 100th anniversary of Smoluchowski's death on September 5 1917, was hosted by the Senate (upper house) Science, Education and Sport Committee, the Physical Society at Warsaw University and Jagiellonian University and the Physics Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
On June 28 Senate speaker Stanislaw Karczewski opened an exhibition devoted to the pioneering Polish kinetic and experimental physicist.
Smoluchowski studied physics at Vienna, and later worked in the Polish territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Building his work around the ideas of Ludwig Boltzmann, Smoluchowski spent time at universities in Berlin, Paris and Glasgow before moving to Lwow (present-day Lviv in Ukraine) in 1899, where he took a chair at the city's university and in 1906-7 headed the Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists.
In 1913 Smoluchowski resettled to Krakow, where he worked in the Experimental Physics Department until its conversion into a military hospital after the outbreak of World War I.
Smoluchowski belonged to the Copernicus Society of Natural Scientists and the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
In his private life he was an avid skier and mountain climber, he also painted watercolours and played the piano.
Smoluchowski's scientific work included basic research on the kinetic theory of matter. In 1904 he discovered density fluctuations in the gas phase, four years later he was the first to explain the phenomenon of critical opalescence with large density fluctuations. He also investigated the colour of the sky, ascribing its blueness to light dispersion in the atmosphere and introducing equations which today bear his name. Also named after him is his 1916 equation of diffusion in an external potential field.
In 1906 Smoluchowski described Brownian motion independently of Albert Einstein, one of his equations became a founding-block of the stochastic processes theory. Einstein is believed to have used Marian Smoluchowski's work results for his own random motion of particles theory. An equation in physics' kinetic theory (The Einstein-Smoluchowski relation - PAP) was named after the two. Einstein also wrote memoirs on Smoluchowski.
A factor related to inter-particle interactions was also named after Marian Smoluchowski (the Smoluchowski factor or von Smoluchowski's F-factor - PAP).
At the 35th Polish Physicists' Congress Smoluchowski was named as one of four Polish physicists whose discoveries warranted the Nobel Prize, alongside Marian Danysz (see: NOTE 1), Jerzy Pniewski (see: NOTE 2) and Karol Olszewski (see: NOTE 3).
NOTE 1: Marian Danysz (March 17, 1909 – February 9, 1983) was a Polish physicist who with Jerzy Pniewski discovered a new form of matter - an atomic nucleus which contained a so-called lambda hyperon alongside a neutron and a neutron.
In 1952 Danysz and Jerzy Pniewski discovered the hypernucleus, obtaining a hypernucleus with two lambda hyperons in the following year.
NOTE 2: Jerzy Pniewski (June 1, 1913 – June 16, 1989) was a Polish mathematician and physicist, and with Marian Danysz discoverer of the hypernucleus. In 1962 Pniewski discovered hypernuclear isomery.
NOTE 3: Karol Olszewski (January 29, 1846 – March 24, 1915) was a Polish chemist, physicist and mathematician, who along with Zygmunt Wroblewski (see: NOTE 4) were the first to obtain stable liquid oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in 1883.
A year later Olszewski became the first to liquefy dynamic hydrogen, attaining a record low temperature of −225 °C (48 K). In the following year he liquefied argon. (PAP)
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