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Victor Moritz Goldschmidt: The Father of Modern Geochemistry
| Article
# : |
16973 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
2,765 Words |
| Author
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Gunnar Kullerud
Gunnar Kullerud was professor of geochemistry at Purdue
University until his death in October 1989. He was coeditor
of
Mineralium Deposita. |
In the 1930s, Victor Moritz Goldschmidt achieved threefold prominence as a physicist, chemist, and geologist, a feat difficult to achieve under today's conditions of scientific specialization. His main interests transcended the basic disciplines of physics and chemistry, leading him to apply their principles to cosmology, the origin of planets, and the distribution of the elements among such bodies. From his youth, he paid, special attention to the earth, becoming a prominent field geologist. His laboratory discoveries established him as the outstanding researcher and experimentalist of his time, and his ability to combine experiment with theory earned him the title of father of modern geochemistry.
Although Goldschmidt was nominated for the Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry, he never received either of these high honors. However, VM, as his students and coworkers fondly called him, received honors from and was elected to numerous European academies of science throughout his career.
Childhood and Youth
Goldschmidt was born January 27, 1888, in Zurich, Switzerland, the only child of Heinrich Goldschmidt, himself a highly regarded physical chemist. Practically all the males in his family were highly educated; most of them, at least in the early days, were rabbis, but later generations included numerous professors, medical doctors, judges and lawyers, and some military officers. Goldschmidt's mother, Amelie, nee Koehne, was also Jewish.
Beginning in 1893, when Goldschmidt was barely five years old, his father moved several times, first to the University of Amsterdam, they to Heidelberg, and finally, in 1900, more permanently to Norway, where he was appointed professor of chemistry at the Royal University of Christiania (later Oslo).
There the Goldschmidt home was frequented by many outstanding scientists who depended on Heinrich as a sounding board for their ideas and as an unerring judge of the scientific soundness. Growing up in this atmosphere, Victor was exposed early to the ideas of some of the great minds of the era. He matriculated at the university in 1905 to study geology, mineralogy, and chemistry, publishing his first paper at age eighteen, during his first year as a university student. The idea for this paper stemmed from field observations of quartz veins, which he followed with laboratory experiments in the pyroluminescence of quartz
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