LIPPMANN, GABRIEL

LIPPMANN, GABRIEL (1845–1921), French physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Though born in Luxembourg, Lippmann spent most of his life in Paris. His association with the Annalesde chimie et de physique, for which he prepared summaries of the articles written in German, enabled him to keep abreast of innovations in electricity. After working in Heidelberg and under the brilliant H.L.F. von Helmholtz in Berlin, Lippmann was appointed professor of probability and mathematical physics at the Sorbonne (1883–86). From 1886 he was professor of experimental science and director of the Sorbonne's research laboratories, a position which he held until his death. Lippmann was responsible for much basic work in classical physics. His early research at Heidelberg was concerned with the effects of electrical charges on surface tension leading to the development of the "capillary-electrometer." In 1879 he presented before the Académie des Sciences, to which he was elected seven years later, his work dealing with the effective mass of a charged body, in which he claimed that the moment of inertia in a charged body was higher than that of an un-charged body. This conclusion is of fundamental importance in the study of the electron. He also devised various scientific instruments: in astronomy his outstanding contributions were the development of the coelostat, an instrument for obtaining a stationary image of the sky, and the uranograph, an instrument for obtaining a map of the sky with lines of longitude at equal time-intervals. He achieved fame in 1891 through his production of color photographs based on the phenomenon of interference, although the three-color system proposed by J.C. Maxwell was preferred. Lippmann was nevertheless awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for the results of this research. His most important works were his Cours de thermodynamique (1886) and Cours d'acoustique et d'optique (1888). Lippmann was elected president of the Académie des Sciences in 1912. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Lebon, Savants du jour: Gabriel Lippmann (1911), incl. bibl.; T. Levitan, Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize (1960), 56–58; N.H. de V. Heathcote, Nobel Prize Winners in Physics, 1901–50 (1953), 65–69. (Ariel Cohen)