Collection Overview
Title: Oskar Klein Papers, 1916-1970
ID: 01/02/005
Creator: Klein, Oskar (1894-1977)
Extent: 2.0 Boxes
Arrangement: Correspondence, alphabetic; manuscripts, chronological.
Languages: Danish [dan], Swedish [swe], German [ger], English [eng]
Scope and Contents of the Materials
One box with manuscripts 1920s-1960s. One box with correspondence (1916-1970). Correspondents include: Pierre Auger, E. Bauer, Guido Beck, Harald Bohr, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Ernst Cassirer, Stanley Deser, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Paul Ehrenfest, Franzinetti, George Gamow, Walter Gordon, Dirk ter Haar, Douglas Rayner Hartree, Dmitri Iwanenko, Pascual Jordan, Jens Lindhard, Fritz London, Robert Eugene Marshak, Thomas Marshall, Lise Meitner, Yoshio Nishina, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Svein Rosseland, Abdus Salam, Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, John Archibald Wheeler, Gian Carlo Wick, Hideki Yukawa.
Biographical Note
Born Mörby, Sweden, 1894, as the youngest son of Sweden's first rabbi, Gottlieb Klein. From the age of 15 he worked, on Svante Arrhenius's invitation, at the Nobel Institute on the solubility of salts with radioactive indicators. From 1918 Klein frequently visited Copenhagen and he stayed there after completing his doctoral dissertation at Stockholms Högskola in 1921. His interest turned to quantum theory, and with Svein Rosseland he introduced "collisions of the second kind". Stayed at Ann Arbor, Michigan 1923-25. Docent, Lund University, 1926. Introduced relativistic wave equation (Klein-Gordon equation). Lecturer NBI 1927. Deeply involved in Bohr's work on correspondence and complementarity. The Klein-Nishina formula (1929) convinced many physicists of the soundness of Dirac's relativistic equation, in spite of difficulties -- one of them known as Klein's paradox. Professor of mathematical physics, Stockholm Högskola, 1930-62. Worked on statistical mechanics, superconductivity (with Jens Lindhard, 1945), distributions of chemical elements and cosmology (cosmological model with Alfvén, 1963). Died in Stockholm 1977.
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