52 Facts About Fritz Zwicky

Fritz Zwicky worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy.

In 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to postulate the existence of unseen dark matter, describing it as "".

Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna, Bulgaria, to a Swiss father and Czech mother.

Fridolin Fritz Zwicky designed and built his family's Fritz Zwicky House in Varna.

Fritz Zwicky was the oldest of three children: he had a younger brother named Rudolf and a sister, Leonie.

Fritz Zwicky's father lived and worked in Bulgaria until 1945, and returned to Switzerland after World War II.

In 1904, at the age of six, Fritz Zwicky was sent to his paternal grandparents to Glarus, Switzerland, to study commerce.

Fritz Zwicky received an advanced education in mathematics and experimental physics at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich.

Fritz Zwicky finished his studies there in 1922 with a Dr sc.

In 1925, Fritz Zwicky emigrated to the United States to work with Robert Millikan at California Institute of Technology after receiving the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

Fritz Zwicky had an office down the hall from Robert Oppenheimer.

Fritz Zwicky developed numerous cosmological theories that have had a profound influence on the understanding of our universe in the early 21st century.

Fritz Zwicky coined the term "supernova" while fostering the concept of neutron stars.

Fritz Zwicky was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Caltech in 1942.

Fritz Zwicky developed some of the earliest jet engines and holds more than 50 patents, many in jet propulsion.

On 25 March 1932, Fritz Zwicky married Dorothy Vernon Gates, a member of a prominent local family and a daughter of California State Senator Egbert James Gates.

On 18 October 1947 Fritz Zwicky married in Switzerland to Anna Margaritha Zurcher.

Fritz Zwicky died in Pasadena, California on February 8,1974, and was buried in Mollis, Switzerland.

Fritz Zwicky was critical of religion and considered it unacceptable to attribute natural phenomena to God.

Fritz Zwicky is remembered as both a genius and a curmudgeon.

The Fritz Zwicky Stiftung was established in Switzerland to carry on his ideas relating to "Morphological analysis".

Fritz Zwicky was a prolific scientist and made important contributions in many areas of astronomy.

Together with colleague Walter Baade, Fritz Zwicky pioneered and promoted the use of the first Schmidt telescopes used in a mountain-top observatory in 1935.

In support of this hypothesis, Fritz Zwicky started looking for supernovae, and found a total of 120 by himself over 52 years, a record which stood until 2009 when passed by Tom Boles.

Fritz Zwicky did his laborious work, comparing photographic plates with the human eye, which is far more challenging and difficult than Boles accomplished using modern technology for his record.

In 1937, Fritz Zwicky posited that galaxies could act as gravitational lenses by the previously discovered Einstein effect.

Fritz Zwicky calculated the gravitational mass of the galaxies within the cluster from the observed rotational velocities and obtained a value at least 400 times greater than expected from their luminosity.

When Edwin Hubble discovered a somewhat linear relationship between the distance to a galaxy and its redshift expressed as a velocity, Fritz Zwicky immediately pointed out that the correlation between the calculated distances of galaxies and their redshifts had a discrepancy too large to fit in the distance's error margins.

Fritz Zwicky proposed that the reddening effect was not due to motions of the galaxy, but to an unknown phenomenon that caused photons to lose energy as they traveled through space.

Fritz Zwicky considered the most likely candidate process to be a drag effect in which photons transfer momentum to surrounding masses through gravitational interactions; and proposed that an attempt be made to put this effect on a sound theoretical footing with general relativity.

Fritz Zwicky considered and rejected explanations involving interactions with free electrons, or the expansion of space.

Fritz Zwicky was skeptical of the expansion of space in 1929, because the rates measured at that time seemed too large.

Fritz Zwicky developed a generalised form of morphological analysis, which is a method for systematically structuring and investigating the total set of relationships contained in multi-dimensional, usually non-quantifiable, problem complexes.

Fritz Zwicky wrote books on the subject in 1957 and 1969, and claimed that he made many of his discoveries using this method.

Fritz Zwicky devoted considerable time to the search for galaxies and the production of catalogs.

Fritz Zwicky was an original thinker, and his contemporaries frequently had no way of knowing which of his ideas would work out and which would not.

Fritz Zwicky is celebrated for the discovery of neutron stars.

Fritz Zwicky told his assistant to fire a gun out through the telescope slit, in the hope it would help smooth out the turbulence.

Fritz Zwicky was very proud of his work in producing the first artificial meteors.

Fritz Zwicky placed explosive charges in the nose cone of a V2 rocket, to be detonated at high altitude and fire high velocity pellets of metal through the atmosphere.

The first attempts appeared to be failures, and Fritz Zwicky sought to try again with the Aerobee rocket.

Fritz Zwicky's requests were denied, until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1.

Twelve days later, on October 16,1957, Fritz Zwicky launched his experiment on the Aerobee, and successfully fired pellets visible from the Mount Palomar observatory.

Fritz Zwicky considered the possibility of rearranging the universe to our own liking.

Fritz Zwicky considered this might be achieved by firing pellets into the Sun to produce asymmetrical fusion explosions, and by this means he thought that the star Alpha Centauri might be reached within 2500 years.

Fritz Zwicky was a generous humanitarian with a great concern for wider society.

Fritz Zwicky had a longstanding involvement with the charitable Pestalozzi Foundation of America, supporting orphanages.

Fritz Zwicky received their gold medal in 1955, in recognition of his services.

Fritz Zwicky loved the mountains, and was an accomplished alpine climber.

Fritz Zwicky was critical of political posturing by all sides in the Middle East, and of the use of nuclear weapons in World War II.

Fritz Zwicky considered that hope for the world lay with free people of good will who work together as needed, without institutions or permanent organizations.

Fritz Zwicky produced hundreds of publications over a long career, covering a great breadth of topics.