Talk:Marian Smoluchowski

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Lemberg or Lviv? Did anyone speak german there?

Actually, people at the university in the town (especially Smoluchowski) spoke german, as Lviv (and Krakow) belonged to Austria between 1772 and 1918. In that period the emperor Josef II founded the university in 1784 as Lviv German university ("Lemberger Deutsche Universität"). It was this university, Smoluchowski - a german native speaker - joined. Smoluchowski himself published in german. I do not know, if he was in a cultural sense polish and felt as a member of the polish nation. Politically he was born and died in the austrian empire. From that point of view, he is as austrian as Boltzmann.

Firstly, we are speaking of year 1899 here. The majority of the population was Polish. I don't know how many German speaking people were there in the city but I don't expect their number was considerable, compared to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians. I don't think it's relevant who founded the university, but since you're mentioning it here ... it was founded in 1661 by John II Casimir of Poland, then closed by Austrians in 1773, then reopened 11 years later. The language of lecture in 1784 was not German but Latin. In 1805 Francis II downgraded it to lyceum status and then reopened it again in 1817 with German as the lecture language. This however does not mean that the city should be referred to in German. Again, I don't think this is relevant, but since you're mentioning it - Smoluchowski spoke Polish. --Lysy ^(talk) 20:22, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

If you like, refer to the town as Lviv. In present day english there are several names used for the town. However, historically correct for the period we are talking of is the name Lemberg (official name between 1772 and 1918). During that period, german was the official language in Lviv, which was culturally a polish town in a ukrainian region belonging to Austria-Hungary. Smoluchowski himself refered to it as Lemberg at the end of his important paper on Brownian Motion ("Zur kinetischen Theorie der Brownschen Molekularbewegung und der Suspensionen", Annalen der Physik, 4. Folge, 21 (1906), p. 756-780, recently reprinted in Einstein/Smoluchowski: "Brownsche Bewegung. Untersuchungen über die Theorie der Brownschen Bewegung. Abhandlung über die Brownsche Bewegung und verwandte Erscheinungen", Harri Deutsch, 1997).

I never heard of a common paper of Einstein and Smoluchowski. They worked at the same time but indepenently on the explanation of Brownian motion. Both found a solution, which Einstein published in 1905, Smoluchowski in 1906 in the Annalen der Physik. The book, given in the Literature section, is a collection of Einstein's and Smoluchowski's papers, which was published in 1997. So both appear as author of one publication, although there's no contribution written by both of them.

[edit] Einstein Plagiarized Smoluchowski Line for Line

Smoluchowski circulated his solution for Brownian Motion to laboratories in Berlin in 1904 to get experimental verification before publishing. Einstein then plagiarized Smoluchowski's solution line for line to publish it in 1905. Smoluchowski then finally published in 1906. Max Planck and also Von Laue both recognized Smoluchowski, not Einstein, for Brownian motion.

The above, unsigned comment by Licorne, is patently false according to one of Licorne's own favorite sources (Langevin). As indicated in the following link, Langevin compared his own approach to Brownian motion, Einstein's, and Smoluchowski's. As indicated, the methodology of all three were different. Einstein's and Langevin's agreed on the resulting observational law. Smoluchowski's disagreed by an anomalous factor. Langevin locate's smoluchowski's mistake, showing his different method should have led to the same formula as Einstein and Langevin. Such outright false statements are, unfortunately, characteristic of Licorne. I say the statement is an outright falsehood because it implies he has looked at the papers and found them line for line the same. Since this is obviously false, Licorne has either lied (or ignorantly copied a lie - the more likey scenario) about seeing the actual papers, or, having seen them, lied about the result of comparing them. All equally inexcusable:

http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/theo1/hanggi/History/Langevin1908.pdf

--Pallen 21:06, 19 March 2006 (UTC)