2. Greatest Accomplishment!!!
The Royal Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physics, for the year 1911, to Wilhelm Wien, Professor at
the University of Würzburg, for his discoveries concerning the
laws of heat radiation.
Quote
“... being of an independent spirit, he found the lavish life of
the student societies distasteful and left the university after
only one semester to travel through the Rhineland and
Thüringen.”
3. He was German.
Son of the landowner Carl Wien, and seemed destined
for the life of a gentleman farmer.
In 1898 he married Luise Mehler.
They had four children.
4. EDUCATION!!!
• Wien went to school in 1879 first at Rastenburg. In 1880
till 1882, he went to the City School at Heidelberg. After
leaving school he went to the University of Göttingen to
study mathematics and the natural sciences and in the
same year also to the University of Berlin. From 1883
until 1885 he worked in the laboratory of Hermann von
Helmholtz and in 1886 he took his doctorate with a thesis
on his experiments on the diffraction of light on sections
of metals and on the influence of materials on the colour
of refracted light.
5. In 1893 he announced the law which states that
the wavelength changes with the temperature, a
law which later became the law of displacement.
In this, and other, respects Wien's work
contributed to the transition from Newtonian to
quantum physics. As Max von Laue wrote of
him, his "immortal glory" was that "he led us to
the very gates of quantum physics
