Siegfried Flügge


Siegfried Flügge was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear energy project. From 1941 onward he was a lecturer at several German universities, and from 1956 to 1984, editor of the 54-volume, prestigious Handbuch der Physik.

Education

From 1929 to 1933, Flügge studied physics at the Technische Hochschule Dresden and the Georg-August University of Göttingen. He received his doctorate at the latter, under Max Born, in 1933.

Career

From 1933 to 1935, he was a teaching assistant at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. From 1936 to 1937, he was a teaching assistant to Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. From 1937 to 1942, as successor to Max Delbrück, Flügge was an assistant to Otto Hahn at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Chemie, in Berlin-Dahlem.
In 1938, Flügge completed his Habilitation at the Technische Hochschule München.
In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner, who had in July of that year fled to The Netherlands and then went to Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. Flügge and Gottfried von Droste, an assistant to Meitner, independently also predicted a large energy release from nuclear fission.
Also in 1939, Flügge published two influential articles on the exploitation of nuclear energy. From then he worked on the German nuclear energy project; collaborators on aspects of this project were for a time known collectively as the Uranverein. Some with whom he collaborated were Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Fritz Houtermans on the theoretical basis of the Uranmaschine. Flügge also extended Niels Bohr’s and J. A. Wheeler’s theory of nuclear fission published in 1939.
The papers by Flügge on the exploitation of nuclear energy were an impetus for action. For example, the Auergesellschaft had a substantial amount of “waste” uranium from which it had extracted radium. After reading Flügge’s paper in Die Naturwissenschaften on the technical use of nuclear energy from uranium, Nikolaus Riehl, the scientific director at Auergesellschaft, recognized a business opportunity for the company. In July 1939, he went to the Heereswaffenamt to discuss the production of uranium. The HWA was interested.
In 1940, on the initiative of Rudolf Tomaschek, despite Wilhelm Müller’s objection, Flügge lectured at the Technische Hochschule München on theoretical physics during the winter semester. From 1941, he was a lecturer at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.
In 1944, Flügge was an ordinarius professor at the University of Königsberg. From 1945 to 1947, he took a position at his alma mater, the University of Göttingen. From 1947 to 1949, he had a position at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. From 1949 to 1950, he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and in 1953 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Later, he was at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
From 1956 to 1984, Flügge was editor of the 54-volume, prestigious Handbuch der Physik published by Springer-Verlag.

Internal report

The following reports were published in Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte, an internal publication of the German Uranverein. The reports were classified Top Secret, they had very limited distribution, and the authors were not allowed to keep copies. The reports were confiscated under the Allied Operation Alsos and sent to the United States Atomic Energy Commission for evaluation. In 1971, the reports were declassified and returned to Germany. The reports are available at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the American Institute of Physics.
He was the younger brother of Wilhelm Flügge.

Selected publications

Articles