Stern, Otto

Stern, Otto (stûrn, Ger. ô`tō shtĕrn), 1888–1969, American physicist, b. Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Breslau, 1912. After resigning from his post at the Univ. of Hamburg in 1933, he became professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and later professor emeritus at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. Stern was an outstanding experimental physicist; his contributions included development of the molecular-beam method, discovery of space quantization (with Gerlach, 1922), measurement of atomic magnetic moments, demonstration of the wave nature of atoms and molecules, and discovery of the proton's magnetic moment. He was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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Stern, Otto (1888–1969) physicist; born in Sorau, Germany. After completing his graduate work in physical chemistry at the University of Breslau, Germany (Ph.D. 1912), he worked with Albert Einstein at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1919 he went to work with Max Born at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Frankfurt, Germany, and it was there, during the 1920s, that Stern developed the use of molecular beams to study the magnetic properties of atoms; he proved the existence of atomic magnetic moments and measured their magnitudes. It was this work that gained him the 1943 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1933, forced by the Nazis to leave Germany, he emigrated to the U.S.A. and there, thanks to a grant from the Buhl Foundation, he took up his work at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie-Mellon University). He became a U.S. citizen in 1939 and, with time out for government research during World War II, he remained affiliated with that institution until he retired in 1946.