Fritz Zwicky

His name crops up very occasionally - but he remains an enigma in many respects.  However - Zwicky, for all his apparent madness - was without doubt a genius with amazing foresight... 

The oldest of three children, Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna – Bulgaria, on February 14^th 1898.  His father was Swiss and his mother, Czech. 

At the age of six, in 1904, Fritz was sent to live with his grandparents in the Zwicky’s family home in the Glarus area of Switzerland, with the intention of studying commerce.  However, over the years he became more interested in maths and physics.  Later he studied mathematics and experimental physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. 

In 1925 he emigrated to America, where he received an ‘International Fellowship’ from the Rockefeller Foundation, and took up a position with the Californian Institute of Technology (CalTech). 

America provided Zwicky with numerous career opportunities, of which he made the most.  In 1942, he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at CalTech.  He also worked as a research director and consultant for Aerojet Engineering Corporation (1943-1961), and a staff member at the Mt Wilson and Palomar Observatory for most of his career.

Known as the ‘Father of the Modern Jet Engine’, he is acknowledged for developing some of the earliest prototype jet engines. 

An article in TIME – March 14^th 1949 – proclaimed Zwicky as the inventor of the Underwater Jet (U.S. Patent 2461797) – the Two Piece Jet Thrust Motor (US Patent US2426526) – and the Inverted Hydro Pulse (US Patent US3044252). 

These patents can still be viewed, complete with original drawings, on the Internet today.  All together, Zwicky held around fifty patents related to jets and thrust.  He is also recognised as performing well-respected research in gaseous ionization, crystals, and the physics of solid state, slow electrons and thermodynamics.   

As an indication of Zwicky’s range of abilities, it is worth mentioning a method for investigating the totality of relationships contained in multi-dimensional, usually nonquantifiable problem complexes. 

BAFFLED by that concept?  So was I - Morphological Analysis – to give the method its correct name, was ‘a way of thinking about any problem’. 

Zwicky developed his method to apply to situations arising during World War II.  Unfortunately – his system bewildered both government and military officials alike.  Nevertheless, his analytical method - now computer assisted - is still used today in a variety of areas.

Naturally, a man of such inexhaustible aptitude also has a very distinguished list of accomplishments in the world of cosmology.  As mentioned above – he was known as the ‘Father of the Jet Engine’ – in addition, he is also referred to as the ‘Father of Dark Matter’!  

Whilst other astronomers assumed the distribution of galaxies to be fairly uniform throughout the galaxy, Zwicky tended to analyse situations from a physicist’s point of view.  He is recorded in a Swiss journal as arguing the case for virtually all galaxies being in clusters. 

Furthermore, he proposed that these clusters appeared to be moving in relation to one another at rates that would violate the laws of gravity – unless one accepted the unexplained presence of a vast amount of - Dunkie Materie – Dark Matter. In so many ways, and as so often happens, he was a man far ahead of his time.

Zwicky, with a colleague, Walter Baade, established and encouraged the use of the first Schmidt telescopes – used in a mountain-top observatory in 1935. 

In 1934, he and Baade also created the term ‘supernova’.  They hypothesised that supernova were the transition of normal stars into neutron stars, as well as the origin of cosmic rays.  In pursuit of his theories, Zwicky proceeded to hunt for supernovae – in total he found one-hundred and twenty over a fifty-two year period. 

In 1938, it was Baade who put forward the idea of using supernovae as Standard Candles to estimate distances in deep space. 

Around the same period – 1937 – Zwicky speculated that galaxy clusters could act as gravitational lenses – as predicted by none other than Albert Einstein.  This prediction was finally confirmed in the year 1979.

Between the years 1961 and 1968, Fritz Zwicky committed a substantial amount of time to his search for galaxies.  This protracted search culminated in the production of a six volume Catalogue of Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies.  These catalogues were all published in Pasadena, by CalTech.

With such an obvious array of achievements – which this article scarcely scratches the surface of - one might have imagined ‘Fritz Zwicky’ to be a name that came easily to mind.  However, in spite of his triumphs, he received very few public accolades during his lifetime, or since. 

History records Zwicky not so much as an inventor, physicist, scientist, astronomer and cosmologist extraordinaire – but rather as an ‘oddball astronomer’.  He stands charged with calling a close colleague a Nazi and for claiming credit for everything that happened in cosmology after Einstein!  He is remembered for attacking his peers both in print and in person! 

He was described by the media of that period as a curmudgeon; that being a bad-tempered, difficult and cantankerous person!  At the Mount Wilson Observatory, he was renowned for referring to other staff members as ‘spherical bastards’ – clarifying his remark – he would add – ‘you are bastards, whichever way I look at you’.

One famous story relates to the time when Zwicky’s laboratory was due an official visit from high-ranking members of the military.  Zwicky is said to have banned them entry to the laboratory, on the grounds that the generals and admirals were not scientists, and therefore would not understand what they were looking at!

Like so many brilliant minds, Zwicky was obviously quite eccentric and clearly had a collection of rather unsavoury idiosyncrasies.  Twice married and lacking it seems, the most basic of social skills, Fritz Zwicky somehow also managed to gain a reputation as a humanitarian. 

He demonstrated a genuine concern for wider society, and in the aftermath of World War II collected literally tons of books on astronomy and other subjects.  These books were shipped to the war-torn scientific libraries of both Europe and Asia.

He is also known to have had a long-standing association with the charitable Pestalozzi Foundation – supporting orphanages.  In 1955, Zwicky received a gold medal in acknowledgment of his services to this foundation.

This then was the complicated character – Fritz Zwicky – a man who once considered the possibility of rearranging the universe to our own liking.  A man who spoke of changing and relocating planets within the solar system; and even outlining how this might be achieved. 

In the 1960s Zwicky considered how the entire solar system might be moved like a huge spaceship to travel to other stars.  Only a man of Zwicky’s intellect could propose anything as outrageous and not suffer widespread public ridicule. 

His honours include the 1949 Presidential Medal of Freedom, for work on rocket propulsion during World War II, and being made professor emeritus at CalTech in 1968.  

In 1972, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, for his distinguished contribution to astronomy and cosmology; with particular mention of his work on neutron stars, dark matter, and the cataloguing of galaxies. 

Fritz Zwicky passed away in Pasadena USA on February 8^th, 1974 – six days before his 76^th birthday.  He was buried in Mollis, Switzerland, the village where he grew up.  The asteroid 1803 Zwicky and lunar crater Zwicky are both named in his honour.