User:Sterafix/Richard A. Beth

Richard Alexander Beth (* January 14th 1906 in Manhattan, New York; † December 26 1999 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a American scientist, who is best known for the Beth's Experiment named after him.

Life and work
Beth was born in Lower Manhatten as the only child of German immigrants. He studied electrical engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI), where he obtained a Bachelor of Science in 1927 and a Master of Science in 1929. Afterwards he studied mathematics at the University Frankfurt and was awarded a Dissertation under Ernst Hellinger in 1932 with a thesis on the spectral representation of Jacobi forms.

When Beth returned to the USA, his mentor Alexander Duff for an assistant professorship at the WPI, which he held until 1939. He also worked as a research assistant at Frist Campus Center (then called "Palmer Physical Laboratory") at the Princeton University under the sponsorship of Albert Einstein. Beth published his most famous work in 1936: The Proof of the Angular Momentum of Circularly Polarized Light. The experiment that accompanies it is now known as Beth's experiment. In 1942, he left Princeton University.

Beginning of the 1940s For many years, Beth was involved in Weapons Research in the development of the penetrating power of projectiles and other projects for the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in the Committee on Passive Protection Against Bombing (PPAB). For his war work, Beth received the Certificate of Merit Medal from President Truman. Although he was not involved in the Manhattan Project, he was selected for the Alsos Mission.

In 1946 Beth became chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, but left in 1954 to work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on the development of high-energy particle accelerators. He stayed in Brookhaven until his retirement in 1971, during which time several scientific publications.

Before his time in Brookhaven, Beth was a Fulbright Exchange professor at the University of Innsbruck, 1963-1964 he held a similar position at the University of Bonn.

After his retirement and until his stroke he continued to work in Brookhaven as a consultant on various projects, including preliminary designs for the magnets of the planned but never realized Superconducting Super Colliders. He also worked on the theory of quaternions and its applications to problems in relativistic physics.

Beth was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Sigma Xi Association and identified strongly with his role as a scientist. He also had a keen interest in the history and philosophy of science, his heroes being Archimedes, Gauss and Einstein.