Schwarzschild, Martin (1912-1997)

Allthought he never got to meet his father he too went on to study astronomy and in particular the structure of stars. With John Von Neumann he was one of the first to use a digital computer to model the internal structure of a star. There is a story which I think refferes to Martin (it is recounted in Kippnehan's 100 Billion suns and I will check to provenance as soon as I can). Martin was walking with his girlfriend, he was the first to realise that nuclear energy must be powering the stars, he turned to his girlfriend and said to her, at the moment I am the only one in the world who knows how the stars shine, but she was not too interested.

I heard another story about Martin from one of my professors, who was a postdoc with him at Princeton. His father had developed the instability criteria in stellar structure. My professor was continually trying to get Martin to talk about this area of physics and managed to get him cornered one day. Martin had to say "according to .... my fathers criteria .." (hell it made me laugh)

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.