Johannes Stark Quotes

• A beam of luminous hydrogen canal rays has, owing to its velocity, exactly the same direction as that of the electric field in which it may be made to move.

  Johannes Stark

• Along a series of lines running from longer to shorter wavelengths the effect of the electric field becomes greater as the serial numbers increase – that is, as the wavelength decreases.

  Johannes Stark

• The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure – or, at least, of the structure of the surface.

  Johannes Stark

• In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta.

  Johannes Stark

• The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom – that is, the ionization of the atom – means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer.

  Johannes Stark

• If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.

  Johannes Stark

• The emitters of the spectral series are without exception single atoms, not compounds of atoms.

  Johannes Stark

• Thus at the beginning of 1906 it seemed to be established that the emitters of the spectral series of chemical elements are their positive atomic ions.

  Johannes Stark

• We can in fact first place the beam of rays of moving positive atomic ions in a plane perpendicular to the axis in which we see the spectral lines emitted by them.

  Johannes Stark

• The movement of the emitters of the spectral lines may be deduced on the basis of the Doppler principle.

  Johannes Stark

• By allowing the positive ions to pass through an electric field and thus giving them a certain velocity, it is possible to distinguish them from the neutral, stationary atoms.

  Johannes Stark

• We have learnt through experience that when an electrical ray strikes the surface of an atom, an electron, and in some circumstances a second and even a third electron, can be detached.

  Johannes Stark

• With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.

  Johannes Stark

• Many scientists will have to contribute to the solution of the great problem; they will have to follow up and measure all those phenomena in which the atomic structure is directly expressed.

  Johannes Stark

• It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

  Johannes Stark

• By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world.

  Johannes Stark

• For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency – their familiar characteristic spectra – and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.

  Johannes Stark

• At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

  Johannes Stark

• The discovery of various phenomena has led to a recognition of the fact that the chemical atom is an individual which again is itself made up of several units into a selfcontained whole.

  Johannes Stark

• Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist.

  Johannes Stark

Johannes Stark (22)

Birth:	15th April, 1874
Death:	21st June, 1957
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Physicist

About

Johannes Stark was born in Schickenhof, Bavaria, Germany. He was a German physicist. In 1919, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields" (the latter is known as the Stark effect). He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Munich in 1897. He served as a lecturer of Physics at the University of Göttingen in 1900-1906. He served as a professor of Physics at Technische Hochschule, Hannover in 1906-09, Technische Hochschule, Aachen in 1909-17, the University of Greifswald in 1917-20, and the University of Würzburg in 1920-22.

Related Authors

• Owen Chamberlain
• Richard Feynman
• Serge Haroche
• Robert Millikan
• Leo Szilard
• John Archibald Wheeler
• Lee Smolin
• Edmond Halley
• Alan Lightman
• James Hansen Newman

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 25th December

Births

• 1889 - Lila Acheson Wallace
• 1916 - Ahmed Ben Bella
• 1945 - Noel Redding
• 1876 - Muhammad Ali Jinnah
• 1975 - Rob Mariano

Deaths

• 1946 - W. C. Fields
• 1962 - Warren R. Austin
• 1937 - Newton Diehl Baker
• 1676 - Sir Matthew Hale
• 1635 - Samuel De Champlain