GEORG SIMON OHM: BIOGRAPHY, CONTRIBUTIONS, WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS - BIOGRAPHIES - 2024

Georg Simon Ohm (1789 - 1854) was a physicist and mathematician of German origin who had a very relevant role in the development of physics, specifically in the area that has to do with electrodynamics. This branch included a law named after him (Ohm's law).

The torsion balance bears his name because it is used to measure electrostatic levels. It is also responsible for the acoustic impedance, which is also known as Ohm's acoustic law.

Source: http://stat.case.edu/~pillar/genealogy/ohm.gif, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most important recognition Ohm received occurred ten years after his death. In 1864 a committee appointed by the British Scientific Association was held to define a standard unit of measurement that referred to resistance.

At that time the decision was made that the electrical resistance unit be named as Ohmad, but in 1867 it was decided definitively that the unit would simply be named ohm, in honor of the German scientist.

At the same time it was established that the symbol of resistance would be the letter omega, which is the last letter in the Greek alphabet. The reason for the choice, proposed by William Preece, is that the pronunciation of this letter is similar to the phoneme that produces the pronunciation of the word ohm.

Biography

Georg Simon Ohm was born in the late 18th century in Erlangen, a city in southern Germany. Ohm's parents were Johann Wolfgang Ohm and Maria Elizabeth Beck, who formed a low-income family, but whose goal was to give their children a good education.

Georg's father was a locksmith, but he took it upon himself to teach his sons science and mathematics. His mother died when the German was only 10 years old. Georg had six siblings, but most died early. Only Georg, Martin and Elizabeth survived.

The family's lack of money forced Georg to work when he was still a teenager to help his father. It was not an obstacle for the German, who always excelled academically. He showed great prowess for research and used to spend a lot of time on his experiments in the laboratory.

He was not the only member of his family who excelled in the area of ​​science. Martin Ohm, his three-year-younger brother, became a renowned mathematician. His most important work has to do with the development of the theory of exponentials.

Education

When Ohm turned 16, he entered the university in his hometown. He passed a stage in which he put aside his studies and devoted himself to the game. This had the consequence that it could only last a year and a half in the academic institution.

Ohm's father was not happy with his son's attitude and decided to send him to Switzerland in late 1806 where he got a job as a math teacher at a school. Some years later he got a job as a private tutor and decided to go back to school.

Scientists like Euler, Laplace, and Lacroix had a great influence on its formation. By 1811 he decided to return to the university in Erlangen to do his doctorate and began to work as a teacher without pay on the academic campus.

Role as teacher

Several years later he received a proposal to teach mathematics and physics at a school in the Bavarian region. Ohm's goal was to teach at the university, but he understood that he had to prove his quality.

He suffered some setbacks with teaching and was frustrated with his role as a teacher. The school where he taught closed and he changed his workplace before entering a Cologne high school, an institution of a higher level since, at least, it had a laboratory to carry out different experiments in the area of ​​physics.

Ohm took advantage of these facilities to carry out his own work. Especially after learning that electromagnetism had been discovered in 1820.

Death

Ohm died when he was 65 years old, in the middle of 1854. He died in Munich and his body is found in the Alter Südfriedhof cemetery.

Contributions

His most important collaboration with the scientific world had to do with the proposition of a mathematical law on electricity. He published his ideas in 1826 and stated that there were simple relationships between electrical elements such as resistance, current, and voltage.

In addition, Ohm was the first person who managed to experimentally prove the existence of this relationship.

It took a long time for Ohm's law to be accepted by the scientific community. In order to test her ideas, she needed to invent or change some devices that already existed and thus be able to adapt them to her needs.

It was a discovery of great importance because it allowed us to respond to a significant number of electrical problems that occurred in the area of ​​physics, at an industrial and business level and even in the homes of citizens.

He created a different way of calculating power and energy levels. At present it is a law that is still in force, since it allows defining the necessary level in the resistors that must be used in the circuits. A precise calculation of this data would allow to take full advantage of the circuits and guarantee an ideal operation.

Works and publications

Ohm published two documents of great importance during 1826. In them he managed to expose mathematically the ideas that Fourier had previously raised about heat conduction.

One of his articles gave details on all the results of the experiments he did. In the second Ohm focused on coming up with new ideas.

His most important work, yes, was public knowledge in 1827 when he wrote The Galvanic Circuit, Mathematically Analyzed. His writing went under the table at first and the weak response and support from the scientific community greatly demotivated Ohm.

Ohm's law

Basically it was a question of analyzing the galvanic circuit but from the point of view of mathematics. She was the first person to experiment and establish results on the relationships between resistance, voltage and current.

Ohm's law is reflected in the mathematical formula R = V / I. This means that the resistance is equal to the voltage between the value of the current. The ohm was designated as the unit for establishing the resistance of electricity.

It was a very relevant law because its range of application was very wide. It could be used in conductors of various types, although always bearing in mind that the resistance of a conductor can suffer alterations due to temperature.

Other works

Ohm also carried out experiments to analyze aspects that had to do with acoustics. The scientist was able to determine that the human being is capable of differentiating the harmonies that exist in the most complicated sounds and at different scales.

A couple of years before he died, he also became interested in the optical subject, especially in relation to light interference.

In 1849 he wrote Elements of Analytical Geometry related to the asymmetric coordinate system. Then, a year before his death, in 1853, the last work of his authorship entitled Fundamentals of Physics: a compendium of lectures was published.

Detractors

Some scientists have tried to downplay Ohm's work as the Englishman Henry Cavendish is considered to have succeeded in demonstrating the same ideas more than 50 years earlier.

The difference between the two was that Ohm did publish his study after obtaining the results of his experiments. For its part, Cavendish's work was only known in 1879 when James Clerk Maxwell made the ideas of the English known.

The two scientists differed on several things. The most notable is that Cavendish calculated the degree of intensity by the pain he felt, since he himself was subjected to the electric current.

When Ohm published his experiments, he did not receive much recognition from his colleagues. Today it is a fundamental part of science and its study.

Ohm also had critics when raising his ideas on acoustics, also known like acoustic law of Ohm or acoustic impedance. His main detractor was August Seebeck, a physicist who was opposed to Ohm's ideas because his mathematical proofs were not strong or well founded.

The debate on Ohm's theory came to an end when Helmholtz supported Ohm's ideas and added some approaches to complete it.

Recognitions

Ohm received several awards throughout his career. One of the most important was when he received the Copley medal from the Royal Society of London, one of the oldest scientific associations on the European continent.

The Copley medal was awarded for the first time in 1731 and served to honor those scientists who had a relevant contribution to science.

For Ohm to receive this award, it was of great importance that he had the public recognition of another scientist. In this case, Claude Pouillet played an important role in supporting the results that Ohm had previously achieved with his experiments on electricity.

He was part of the Berlin Academy and was a member of the Turin Academy in Italy. In 1841 he became one of the foreign members of the Royal Society in London, one of the most important honors for scientists of the time.

His most important recognition came in 1849 when he was offered a position as a professor at the University of Munich. It was a job he fought for all his life and a position he managed for five years as a physics teacher.

Names

Its name is associated with different processes, theories and objects. Ohm's laws, the ohm as a unit of measurement, a crater on the moon and an asteroid are just some of the examples of how their name was used to baptize different things.

References

1. Appleyard, R. (1928). Pioneers of electrical communication: Georg Simon Ohm. New York: Internat. Standard Electric Corporation.
2. Boylestad, R. (2017). Introduction to circuit analysis. Naucalpan de Juárez: Pearson Education.
3. Hartmann, L. (2014). Georg Simon Ohm. Briefe, Urkunden und Dokumente. Hamburg: Severus Verlag.
4. Oakes, E. (2001). Encyclopedia of world scientists. New York: Facts on File.
5. Ohm, G., FRANCIS, W. and LOCKWOOD, T. (1891). The Galvanic Circuit investigated mathematically… Translated by W. Francis. With a preface by the editor, TD Lockwood. Pp. 269. D. van Nostrand Co.: New York.