Stern, Otto

Otto Stern, (born Feb. 17, 1888, Sohrau, Ger. [now Zory, Pol.]—died Aug. 17, 1969, Berkeley, Calif., U.S.), German-born scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1943 for his development of the molecular beam as a tool for studying the characteristics of molecules and for his measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton.

Stern’s early scientific work was theoretical studies of statistical thermodynamics. In 1914 he became a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of Frankfurt and in 1923 a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Hamburg. Stern and Walther Gerlach performed their historic molecular-beam experiment at Hamburg in the early 1920s. By shooting a beam of silver atoms through a nonuniform magnetic field onto a glass plate, they found that the beam split into two distinct beams instead of broadening into a continuous band. This experiment verified the space quantization theory, which stated that atoms can align themselves in a magnetic field only in a few directions (two for silver), instead of in any direction, as classical physics had suggested. (See also Stern-Gerlach experiment.) In 1933 Stern measured the magnetic moment (strength of a subatomic particle’s magnetic property) of the proton by using a molecular beam and found that it was actually about 2¹/₂ times the theoretical value.

In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, Stern was compelled to leave Germany. He went to the United States, where he became research professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. He remained there until his retirement in 1945.