Майкельсон (якого інтерферометр) походить з Польщі
01/17/2008 | Хома Брут
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200801/
Michelson’s Polish Roots
Not only out of national pride but also in keeping with historical evidence, I would like to correct a mistake in “This Month in Physics History” in the November APS News. Albert Abraham Michelson was born in 1852 in Strzelno, a small and very old town, which at that time was occupied by Prussia during the partitioning of Poland; he was born neither in Germany, as stated in the article, nor in Prussia, as is commonly written in his biographies on the Internet. He was born to a Jewish-Polish family; his father was a Jewish merchant from the nearby town of Inowrocław, and his mother, Rozalia Przyłubska, was the daughter of a Polish merchant in Strzelno.
For his whole life Michelson was proud of his Polish roots. Many years after his death his daughter, Dorothy Michelson-Stevens, asked the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (birthplace of Copernicus, thirty miles from Strzelno) to identify the place of her father’s birth, the name of which she knew only in a misspelled version. In the local archives in Strzelno it was found that Michelson indeed was born there. The members of the Toruń chapter of the Polish Physical Society then decided to commemorate this finding with a plaque, written in Polish, which states: “In this town, on December 19, 1852, Albert Abraham Michelson was born; Professor at the University of Chicago, Nobel Prize Laureate. With his famous experiments on the velocity of light he started a new era of development of physics. This plaque, which salutes this great physicist, was funded by the Polish Physical Society.”
Lidia Smentek
Nashville, TN, and
Toruń, Poland
Michelson’s Polish Roots
Not only out of national pride but also in keeping with historical evidence, I would like to correct a mistake in “This Month in Physics History” in the November APS News. Albert Abraham Michelson was born in 1852 in Strzelno, a small and very old town, which at that time was occupied by Prussia during the partitioning of Poland; he was born neither in Germany, as stated in the article, nor in Prussia, as is commonly written in his biographies on the Internet. He was born to a Jewish-Polish family; his father was a Jewish merchant from the nearby town of Inowrocław, and his mother, Rozalia Przyłubska, was the daughter of a Polish merchant in Strzelno.
For his whole life Michelson was proud of his Polish roots. Many years after his death his daughter, Dorothy Michelson-Stevens, asked the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (birthplace of Copernicus, thirty miles from Strzelno) to identify the place of her father’s birth, the name of which she knew only in a misspelled version. In the local archives in Strzelno it was found that Michelson indeed was born there. The members of the Toruń chapter of the Polish Physical Society then decided to commemorate this finding with a plaque, written in Polish, which states: “In this town, on December 19, 1852, Albert Abraham Michelson was born; Professor at the University of Chicago, Nobel Prize Laureate. With his famous experiments on the velocity of light he started a new era of development of physics. This plaque, which salutes this great physicist, was funded by the Polish Physical Society.”
Lidia Smentek
Nashville, TN, and
Toruń, Poland