Word: ehrenhaft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pondering this revolutionary theory, and well aware that Dr. Ehrenhaft is a cantankerous man in an argument, his fellow physicists kept skeptically...
Author of this idea was unorthodox Physicist Felix Ehrenhaft, whom most of his colleagues consider a champion leaper-to-a-conclusion. Last year Dr. Ehrenhaft started a sharp argument among physicists by announcing that magnetism has currents which flow like electricity (TIME, May 22). At a Manhattan meeting of the American Physical Society last week, he told how he had projected a very fine light beam vertically in a glass tube, then dropped into the beam microscopic particles of matter (e.g., chromium). When the particles were smaller than the light's wave length, they fell straight down. But bigger...
...Ehrenhaft concluded that the energy which made the particles rotate could have come only from the light. He pointed out that physicists had previously observed that a beam of light creates electric and magnetic fields, exerts pressure against matter, can be rotated by a magnetic field (Faraday) or by certain substances which radiate energy affecting light...
...Pittsburgh only one physicist outspokenly opposed Ehrenhaft. Dr. Jacob E. Goldman, 23-year-old Westinghouse magnetism researcher, rose to remark that he had repeated Ehrenhaft's experiments, found only bubbles, no magnetic current. His results suited another youngster, 27-year-old James T. Kendall of England's Metropolitan-Vickers laboratory. Dr. Kendall declared in Nature that Ehrenhaft's claims "may turn out to be no more valid than his previous claims of the existence of charges smaller than the electron...
...Ehrenhaft promised to prove his case...