Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld (February 24, 1892 in Vienna, Austria – June 3, 1978 in Washington, DC, U.S. ) was an Austrian-American physicist.
Herzfeld was born in the Vienna of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a physician and ordinarius professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Vienna. His mother, Camilla nee Herzog, was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and sister of the organic chemist R. O. Herzo...
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Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld (February 24, 1892 in Vienna, Austria – June 3, 1978 in Washington, DC, U.S. ) was an Austrian-American physicist.
Herzfeld was born in the Vienna of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a physician and ordinarius professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Vienna. His mother, Camilla nee Herzog, was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and sister of the organic chemist R. O. Herzog.
In 1902, when Herzfeld was 10 years old, he was enrolled in the private Gymnasium Schottengymnasium, which was run by the Benedictine Order of the Roman Catholic Church and had its name derived from the fact that the founders came from Scotland. He attended this school until 1910, when he began attending the University of Vienna to study physics and chemistry. In 1912, he took courses at the University of Zurich and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH). It was in Zurich he met Otto Stern, who was at the ETH; Herzfeld later...
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