Reinhold Furth

Prof Reinhold Heinrich (Henry) Furth FRSE (20 October 1893 – 17 July 1979) was a Czech-born physicist noted for his 1951 BAAS lecture Physics and Social Equilibrium. He is also remembered for his 1934 theory that stars are composed of Antiparticles.^[1]

He was co-author with Albert Einstein of the Theory of Brownian Movement.

Life

He was born in Prague on 20 October 1893 and was educated there at the Austrian State Gymnasium. He then attended the Charles University of Prague gaining a doctorate (PhD) in 1916. From 1931 to 1938 he was Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Prague. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War he moved to Scotland, becoming a Research Fellow at Edinburgh University.

In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Max Born, Robert Schlapp, Ivor Etherington, and James Pickering Kendall.^[2] In 1965 he won the society’s Keith Medal. In Edinburgh he lived at 60 Grange Loan. In 1947 he left Edinburgh to become a Reader in Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College in London.

He died in Chislehurst in London on 17 July 1979.

Publications

• Theory of Brownian Movement (1915) with Albert Einstein
• Dynamic Theory of Gases (1926) with James Jeans
• On the Theory of Stochastic Phenomena and its Application to some Problems of Cosmic Physics (1956)
• Fundamental Problems of Modern Theoretical Physics (1970)
• The Philosophy of Niels Bohr (1958)

References