Benutzer:Rorabonn/englischsprachige Version von Wolfgang Kundt

Wolfgang Kundt

Wolfgang Kundt in 2017

Wolfgang Kundt (*3. June 1931 in Hamburg) is a German Astrophysicist.

He studied Theoretical Physics in Hamburg, centered on General Relativity Theory (GRT), and got his diploma in 1956, ph.d. in 1959, with teacher Pascual Jordan.

With him, Juergen Ehlers, and Engelbert Schuecking, he collaborated in a joint seminar, known as Hamburg's 'Jordan Seminar' on GRT. In 1965, he habilitated at Hamburg on "Canonical Quantisation of gauge-invariant Field Theories", and was subsequently Lecturer and - since 1971 - 'Scientific Adviser and Professor' at Hamburg University . When Jordan had reached retirement age, in 1977, Wolfgang Priester called him to the 'Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität' at Bonn, where he remained active beyond his own retirement, in 1996, until today. During his career, his scientific interests expanded to encorporate astrophysics, geo-physics, and biophysics.

As a guest scientist, Kundt has transiently visited the following universities and research institutes: Syracuse (N.Y., 1959), Pittsburgh (Pa, 1966), CERN (1972), Bielefeld (1973), Kiel (1974), Hamburg (1975-76), Kyoto (Japan, 1978), Boston (BU, 1986), Bangalore (1987), Linz (1999), Hsinchu (Taiwan, 2002), Maribor (Slowenia, 2004), Rio de Janeiro (2008, 2010, 2012), Buenos Aires (2012), and Gonder (Aethiopia, 2015).

During the years 1969-1979, he also conducted the (passive) celestial mechanics experiment E11 of the German-American spacecraft project HELIOS, which for technical reasons had to be eventually sacrificed to the ten active experiments on board.

During his life, Kundt has profited from early encounters, and collaborations with the following outstanding scientists (in historical order): Pascual Jordan and Juergen Ehlers, Klaus Hasselmann, Wolfgang Pauli, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Peter Bergmann, Thomas Gold, John A. Wheeler, Felix Pirani, Brandon Carter, Hermann Bondi, Paul Dirac, Rolf Hagedorn, Nigel Holloway, Nino Zichichi, Peter Scheuer, Richard Feynman, Malvin Ruderman, Philip Morrison, David Layzer, Zdenek Kopal, John Maddox, and many others.

In 1984, Zichichi asked him to direct yearly courses at Erice (Sicily), on 'neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, and jets'.

His scientific interests thereby moved from gravitational waves (of GRT) to neutron stars and accretion disks, to the astrophysical jets, to supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts, further to terrestrial plate tectonics, to the Tunguska catastrophe (of 30 June 1908), and to the osmotically pumped water circulation in plants. With these widely spaced interests, he followed his teacher Pascual Jordan, and decades-long friend Thomas Gold; they influenced his almost 300 publications, among them the books "Astrophysics, a new approach" (2005), and "Physikalische Mythen auf dem Prüfstand" (2014).

In particular, a new explanation has been given by Wolfgang Kundt in his 1999 analysis of the giant blowout near the Stoney Tunguska river, in Siberia in 1908, based on the facts collected by Moscow's Andrei Olchowatow, as the present-day formation of a kimberlite, in which ten megatons of methane were explosively ejected, whose icy remnants in the upper atmosphere caused three bright nights to follow in Europe.

He is married since 1966, and has a daughter (Liane), and a son (Rasko).

Selected works

• Astrophysics. A Primer. Springer, Berlin u. a. 2001, ISBN 3-540-41748-6 (2. Auflage als: Astrophysics. A New Approach. ebenda 2005, ISBN 3-540-22346-0).
• als Herausgeber: Neutron Stars and their Birth Events (= NATO ASI Series. C: Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 300). Kluwer, Dordrecht u. a. 1990, ISBN 0-7923-0596-5.
• Kosmische Überschallstrahlen. In: Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Natur-, Ingenieur- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Vorträge. N 359, 1988, ISSN 0066-5754, S. 7–28.
• als Herausgeber: Astrophysical Jets and their Engines (= NATO ASI Series. C: Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 208). Reidel, Dordrecht u. a. 1987, ISBN 90-277-2548-9.
• als Herausgeber: Physik des Sonnensystems und der Kometen (= Studium Universale. Bd. 6). Bouvier, Bonn 1985, ISBN 3-416-04006-6.
• mit Jürgen Ehlers: Exact solutions of gravitational field equations. In: Louis Witten (Hrsg.): Gravitation. An Introduction to Current Research. Wiley, New York u. a. 1962, S. 49–101.
• mit Ole Marggraf: Physikalische Mythen auf dem Prüfstand. Eine Sammlung begründeter Alternativtheorien von Geophysik über Kosmologie bis Teilchenphysik, Springer 2014, ISBN 978-3-642-37705-1
• Jets from Stars and Burning Disks - The SS 433 System - Our Galactic Center - Epilogue, in: W. Kundt (Hrsg.), Jets from Stars and Galactic Nuclei, Lecture Notes in Physics 471, Springer 1996, S. 1–18, 140–144, 265–270, 284–287.

See also

• Literature of and about Wolfgang Kundt in the catalogue of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
• Homepage of Wolfgang Kundt
• Blog of Wolfgang Kundt
• Astrophysical Jets: What are they?