Ernst Gehrcke - Career

Career

In 1901, Gehrcke joined the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR, Reich Physical and Technical Institute, after 1945 renamed the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt). In 1926, he became the director of the optical department, a position he held until 1946. Concurrent with his position at the PTR, he was a Privatdozent at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität from 1904 to 1921 and an außerordentlicher Professor (extraordinarius professor) from 1921 to 1946. After the close of World War II, the University was in the Russian sector of Berlin.

In 1946, Gehrcke worked at Carl Zeiss AG in Jena, and he helped to develop and become the director of the Institute for Physiological Optics at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. In 1949, he went to East Berlin to the Deutsches Amt für Materialprüfung (German Office for Materials and Product Testing). In 1953, he became the director of the optical department of the Deutsches Amt für Maß und Gewicht (DAMG, German Office for Weights and Measures) in East Berlin, the East German equivalent to the West German Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (Federal Physical and Technical Institute).

Gehrcke contributed to the experimental techniques of interference spectroscopy (interferometry), physiological optics, and the physics of electrical discharges in gases. In 1903, with Otto Lummer, he developed the Lummer–Gehrcke method in interferometry. In 1908, with O. Reichenheim, he discovered anode rays. In 1927, with Ernst Gustav Lau, he developed the multiplex interferometric spectroscope for precision resolution of spectral-line structures.

Gehrcke, an experimentalist who would not give up the concept of the luminiferous aether, had been critical of relativity since 1911. This played into an event organized by Paul Weyland. Weyland, a radical political activist, professional troublemaker, small-time criminal, and editor of the anti-Semitic periodical Völkische Monatshefte, organized the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Naturforscher zur Erhaltung reiner Wissenschaft (Working Society of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science), which was never officially registered. Weyland enlisted the support of prominent scientists, such as the physics Nobel Laureate Philipp Lenard to lend credibility to the Society. The Society held its first and only event on 24 August 1920, featuring lectures against Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Weyland gave the first presentation in which he slandered Einstein as a plagiarizer. Gehrcke gave the second and last presentation. Einstein, for entertainment, attended the event with Walther Nernst. Max von Laue, Walther Nernst, and Heinrich Rubens published a brief and dignified response to the event, in the leading Berlin daily Tägliche Rundschau, on 26 August. Einstein published a lengthy reply on 27 August, which he later regretted as it contributed to the public polemics. Anti-Semitism and anti-theoretical physics (especially with respect to the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics) were core elements of the Deutsche Physik movement.

The physics Nobel Laureate Philipp Lenard suggested Gehrcke for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

From 1922 to 1925, Gehrcke was also a member of the Kuratorium (board of trustees) of the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory. On 9 February 1922, Max Planck nominated Gehrcke, Max von Laue, G. Müller, Walther Nernst to sit on the Kuratorium, and they were installed by the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian Academy of Sciences). Gehrcke represented the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt. During their appointment, they sat four times with Albert Einstein present. This was a surprising collaboration in view of what had happened just 18 months earlier at the gathering under the auspices of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Naturforscher and the responses in the press by Einstein, Laue, and Nernst.