ÖPG-CMD Joint Meeting 2026

A brief history of Victor Weisskopf, a unique 20th century physicist

Sep 21, 2026, 4:00 PM

1h

HS 05.01 (University of Graz)

4) Invited talk GEP: History of Physics Parallel

Speaker

Prof. Walter Kutschera (University of Vienna, Faculty of Physics)

Description

Victor Weisskopf (1908-2002) belonged to the generation of 20th century physicists who experienced the development of quantum physics in the 1920s and 1930s as well as the Manhattan project and the rise of accelerator-based physics after the Second World War.
He was a theoretical physicist at heart, but like other great physicists of his generation (e.g. Enrico Fermi) he knew “everything” in physics. In 1991, Weisskopf described his extraordinary life in a beautiful autobiography [1]. He visited his hometown Vienna for the last time in 2000, when a symposium in memory of the 100th birthday of Wolfgang Pauli was held at the University of Vienna. Very recently, a new biography on the life of Victor Weisskopf was published in German, which describes his life between science and conscience [2]. In this contribution, an effort will be made to describe the many facets of the life of Victor Weisskopf in a concise form.

[1] V. Weiskopf, 1991. The Joy of Insight – Passions of a Physicist, Basic Books, New York
[2] P. Illetschko, 2026. Im Schatten der Atombombe: Victor Weisskopf – ein Physikerleben zwischen Wissenschaft und Gewissen, Residenzverlag Salzburg-Wien.