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Karl Siegmund Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈʃvaʁtsʃɪlt] ^ⓘ; 9 October 1873 – 11 May 1916) was a German physicist and astronomer.

Schwarzschild provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to a derivation of the Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole.

Schwarzschild accomplished this while serving in the German army during World War I. He died the following year from the autoimmune disease pemphigus, which he developed while at the Russian front. Various forms of the disease particularly affect people of Ashkenazi Jewish origin.

Asteroid 837 Schwarzschilda is named in his honour, as is the large crater Schwarzschild, on the far side of the Moon.

Life

Karl Schwarzschild was born on the 9th of October 1873 in Frankfurt on Main to Jewish parents. His father was active in the business community of the city, and the family had ancestors in the city dating back to the sixteenth century. The family owned two fabric stores in Frankfurt. One of his brothers is the painter Alfred Schwarzschild. Karl attended a Jewish primary school until 11 years of age and then the Lessing-Gymnasium (as in secondary school). He received an all-encompassing education, including subjects like Latin, Ancient Greek, music and art, but developed a special interest in astronomy early on. In fact he was something of a child prodigy, having two papers on binary orbits (celestial mechanics) published before he was sixteen.

After Graduation in 1890 he attended the University of Strasbourg to study astrology.After 2 years he transferred to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he obtained his doctorate in 1896 for a work on Henri Poincaré's theories.

From 1897, he worked as assistant at the Kuffner Observatory in Vienna. His work here was dedicated towards photometry of star clusters and laid the foundations for a formula linking the intensity of the star light, exposure time, and the resulting contrast on a photographic plate. An integral part of that theory is the Schwarzschild exponent (astrophotography). In 1899 he returned to Munich to complete his Habilitation.

From 1901 until 1909 he was a professor at the prestigious institute at Göttingen, where he had the opportunity to work with some significant figures, including David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. Schwarzschild became the director of the observatory in Göttingen. He married Else Rosenbach, a great granddaughter of Friedrich Wöhler and daughter of a professor of surgery at Göttingen, in 1909. Later that year they moved to Potsdam, where he took up the post of director of the Astrophysical Observatory. This was then the most prestigious post available for an astronomer in Germany.

Karl Schwarzschild's grave at Stadtfriedhof (Göttingen)

From 1912, Schwarzschild was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the German army, despite being over 40 years old. Yet he volunteered for service. He served on both the western and eastern fronts specifically helping with ballistic calculations.Thereby he rose to the rank of lieutenant in the artillery.

While serving on the front in Russia in 1915, he began to suffer from a rare and painful autoimmune skin disease called pemphigus. Nevertheless, he managed to write three outstanding papers, two on the theory of relativity and one on quantum theory. His papers on relativity produced the first exact solutions to the Einstein field equations, and a minor modification of these results gives the well-known solution that now bears his name — the Schwarzschild metric.

In March 1916 Schwarzschild was cleared from service due to his sickness and returned to Göttingen. Two months later, on May 11th 1916, Schwarzschild's struggle with pemphigus probably eventually led to his death at the age of 42.

He rests in his family grave the Stadtfriedhof Göttingen.

With his wife Else he had three children: Agathe Thornton (1910-2006) who emigrated to Great Britain in 1933. In 1946 she moved New Zealand where she became a Classics professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin; Martin who went on to become a professor of astronomy at Princeton University; and Alfred (1914-1944) who took his own life due to the persecution of Jews in the Holocaust.

Written Records

The scientific estate of Karl Schwarzschild is stored in a special collection of the Lower Saxony National- and University Library of Göttingen.