Hannes Alfvén (1908 - 1995) The son of Johannes Alfvén and his wife Anna-Clara Romanus, Hannes had an exceptional family background. His mother was one of the first female physicians in Sweden, a remarkable achievement at that time. His father, also a practicing physician, had a strong interest in science. One of his uncles, Hugo Alfvén, was a famous composer, another was an inventor, and a third, an agronomist by profession, was very interested in astronomy and was far ahead of his contemporaries in formulating ideas about the environment and its problems. According to Alfvén's own account, two experiences in his youth, one at home and one in school, influenced his intellectual development and his professional career. One was the gift at an early age of a popular book on astronomy, written by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion. This he read passionately, and it kindled a lifelong interest in astronomy and astrophysics. The other was his membership in the school's radio club where he built radio receivers. There was no nearby radio station, and the one in Stockholm was too weak to be received with primitive equipment in Norrköping. The most promising was the strong station in Aberdeen, Scotland. Alfvén has described, with some passion, the thrill he felt when some faint notes of music emerged out of the atmospheric noise and could be identified as coming from Aberdeen. After high school, he entered the University of Uppsala where he studied mathematics, experimental, and theoretical physics. Working in a physics department that was focused on spectroscopy, he demonstrated his characteristic intellectual independence by choosing topics that we would now classify as nuclear physics and electronics. The title of his doctoral thesis (1932), which he said was a direct continuation of his radio club activities, was "Ultra-Short Electromagnetic Waves". Alfvén, again following his own visions, moved into electronics and astronomy just when "everyone else" was moving into nuclear physics. For the next eight years, he worked first at the University of Uppsala and later at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. During this period, he spent two relatively brief periods abroad: a few months with Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in Berlin and a half year or so in Cambridge with Rutherford. | |
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