Ernst Emil Alexander Back German experimental physicist. Date of Birth: 21.10.1881 Country: Germany

Biography of Ernst Emil Alexander Bak

Ernst Emil Alexander Bak was a German experimental physicist. Born in Freiburg, he attended a gymnasium in Strasbourg. From 1902 to 1906, Bak studied law in Strasbourg, Munich, and Berlin, and then worked for two years in the administration of justice in Alsace-Lorraine. In 1909, he decided to pursue his education in physics, and in 1912, he completely abandoned his legal career to become a student of Friedrich Paschen at the University of Tübingen. That same year, Bak, together with Paschen, discovered that strong magnetic fields simplify the complex structure of the Zeeman effect, transforming the anomalous splitting into a normal triplet known as the Paschen-Bak effect. This research formed the topic of his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 1913.

From 1914 to 1918, Bak served in the First World War. After its conclusion, he became the head of the Veifa-Werke laboratory in Frankfurt am Main, which produced electrical and X-ray equipment. In 1920, he returned to Tübingen, where he continued studying the splitting of spectral lines in a magnetic field. In 1926, he was invited to the position of associate professor at the University of Hohenheim, and from 1929, he became a full professor. In 1936, he returned to the University of Tübingen as a professor and retired in 1948. Bak passed away in Munich in 1959. One of the craters on the Moon is named after him.