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George Michael Volkoff, (February 23, 1914 – April 24, 2000) was a Russian-Canadian physicist and academic who helped, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, predict the existence of neutron stars before they were discovered.
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George Michael Volkoff, (February 23, 1914 – April 24, 2000) was a Russian-Canadian physicist and academic who helped, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, predict the existence of neutron stars before they were discovered.
George Volkoff a adăugat o fotografie
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Early life He was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1914. His father, an engineer, relocated his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1924. Unable to find work, his father moved the family again to Harbin, Manchuria, in 1927 to teach at a Russian technical school. In 1936, after Volkoff's mother died, his father returned to Russia but found himself a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. He was exiled to the arctic camps where he would die.
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Education and academic work Volkoff returned to Vancouver in 1930 and attended the University of British Columbia, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics in 1934 and a master's degree in 1936. He then studied with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley. At this time, Oppenheimer became interested in relativistic astrophysics, in particular, the stability of compact objects. As was typical, Oppenheimer worked with a student in his investigations. For the topic of neutron stars, he picked Volkoff. Together, they published the paper "On Massive Neutron Cores" in 1939. This was Volkoff's first and most famous scientific contribution. Volkoff learned general relativity from the textbook Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology (1934) by Richard Chace Tolman, who also participated in this research project. Because nuclear interactions were poorly understood at this time, they had to make order-of-magnitude estimates. Oppenheimer and Volkoff showed that there was a limit to how heavy a neutron star could be, now known as the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, beyond which it would collapse due to its own gravity. They showed that the maximum mass of a neutron star must be between one half and several solar masses. Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish identified the first known neutron…
George Volkoff a lăsat un gând
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Honours In 1946, he chosen to be a member of the Order of the British Empire. UBC gave him an honorary doctorate for his theoretical work on CANDU reactors during the Second World War. In 1994, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for having "contributed to the general development of physics in Canada and, in particular, at the University of British Columbia." He died in Vancouver in 2000, following a series of strokes that began in 1996.