Stark, Johannes

Stark, Johannes, 1874–1957, German physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Munich, 1897. From 1900 until he retired in 1922, Stark served short stints on the faculties of several academic institutions, including the universities of Göttingen, Hanover, Greifswald, and Würzburg. Stark became involved with the Nazi party, was president of the Reich Physical-Technical Institute from 1933 to 1939, and after World War II served four years in a labor camp as the result of the denazification movement (1947–51). He was awarded the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics for two major discoveries. In 1905 he observed the Doppler effect in radiation emitted by accelerated hydrogen atoms in a discharge tube, and in 1913 he reported the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields, a discovery that is known as the Stark effect and that contributed to the understanding of atomic structure.

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