Walter Schottky, Atomtheoretiker und Elektrotechniker: Sein Leben und Werk bis ins Jahr 1941

摘要

Regardless of your acquaintance with the Schottky effect, the Schottky diode, or other phenomena and artifacts named after the German physicist and corporate scientist of the Siemens Company, Walter Schottky (1886-1976), there may be reasons to read this pioneering biography. Approved as a doctoral dissertation in Munich, the account stretches from the First World War over the Weimar Republic into the Nazi period, thus covering a time when German physics and electrical engineering led the world. Still, you need to be something of a diehard fan of German Gruendlichkeit in order to appreciate its excruciating detail. A plethora of quotations from letters, postcards, dairy entries, patents, scientific publications, and reminiscences, all in all making up about 50 percent of the text, certainly gives life to both environment and individual. But this petty flood also hampers the historical analysis of a professional life in corporate research. And the vast secondary literature on the theme has left but a few marks on Reinhard Serchinger's study.