Philipp Lenard
German physicist (1862-1947) · Germany · Scientists · Died at 84
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Something wrong?He won a Nobel Prize for cathode ray work that helped unlock the photoelectric effect, then spent his final decades as a zealous Nazi ideologue attacking Einstein's relativity as "Jewish physics."
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About this person
Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard was born on 7 June 1862 in what was then Hungary. His experiments with cathode rays earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905, and he realized the photoelectric effect experimentally - finding that ejected electron energy depends on light's frequency, not its intensity. In the 1920s he became an active proponent of Nazi ideology and supported Adolf Hitler. During the Third Reich, Lenard served as an important role model for the Deutsche Physik movement, which sought to purge theoretical physics of what he and others labeled "Jewish physics" - a direct attack on Albert Einstein's contributions. He died on 20 May 1947.
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