Johannes Stark Biography

Johannes Stark was a German scientist who won the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Stark Effect. He was also closely involved with the 'Deutsche Physik' movement, a nationalist movement in the German physics community, under the Nazi regime. He studied at the local grammar school located in Bayreuth and subsequently at Regensburg, before graduating from University of Munich. He physics, chemistry and mathematics, and crystallography at the university. Following his graduation he worked in different roles at the Physics Institute at the University of Munich. Thereafter, he worked for plenty of universities in Germany, including the University of Gottingen, the RWTH Aachen University and the University of Greifswald among others. He also served as the editor of one of the scientific publications in Germany and it was during his editorship that he gave exposure to an unknown Albert Einstein by publishing a paper on the Theory of Relativity. However, under the Nazi regime in Germany, he became closely involved with the ultra nationalistic ‘German Physics’ movement that advocated the hegemony of German scientists. He had also criticised Einstein by calling him a propagator of ‘Jewish Science’.