| Description | The material in this section covers Simon's career, from his resumption of his academic studies in 1919, up until leaving Germany for the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, in 1933. It includes notebooks dating from the time of Simon's DPhil; early working papers on his low temperature research; correspondence with Prof A Eucken, Breslau, and also papers on patents registered by Simon for technical equipment. |
| AdminHistory | After service in the First World War, Simon resumed his studies of physics and chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1919. There he came under the influence of Max Planck, von Laue, Haber, and in particular Nernst, then director of the Physikalisch-Chemisches Institut of the university, under whom Simon did his thesis work on specific heats at low temperatures. He became DPhil in December 1921 and spent the next ten years in the same laboratory, becoming in 1924 a Privatdozent and in 1927 an Extraordinarius (associate professor).
The Berlin period established Simon's reputation as a great thermodynamicist and the outstanding low temperature physicist of his generation. Much of his work in Berlin was directly connected with the Nernst heat theorem and it is largely thanks to Simon's work that it has come to be regarded as the third law of thermodynamics, equal in fundamental importance to the first and second laws.
It was in Berlin that Simon began his extensive researches on fluids at high pressures and low temperatures in what he called model experiments. The basic idea was that by studying the melting pressures of substances with low boiling-points, that is, weak intermolecular attractive forces, one could predict how other substances would behave under conditions difficult to realize in practice. Thus, his success in solidifying helium at 50 °K, that is, ten times the critical temperature, enabled him to make hypotheses about the earth's core. These and other experiments required liquid hydrogen and liquid helium, and the Berlin phase was notable for the development of many new low temperature techniques. For the liquefaction of helium on a small but useful scale Simon developed the desorption method and in 1927 his laboratory became the fourth institution in the world where experiments down to the temperature of liquid helium could be carried out.
Early in 1931 Simon succeeded A. Eucken as professor of physical chemistry at the Technische Hochschule of Breslau. The spring semester of 1932 was spent as visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where Simon conceived and developed his idea of the so-called expansion method for helium liquefaction and he was thus the first person to liquefy helium in the United States. At Breslau, Simon had working on his staff his cousin Kurt Mendelssohn and Nicholas Kurti. ('mostly from Sir Francis Simon', by Nicholas Kurti, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). |