Walther Bothe

During his incarceration in Russia, Walther Bothe met Barbara Below. She was from Moscow and returned with him to Germany after their wedding in 1920. They sired two children.

Though he was a busy man, he took time off to paint. His inspirations were the mountains and he dabbled in oil and watercolor pieces. He discussed French impressionists with the same enthusiasm with which he discussed physics.

He was also a music lover, listening to pieces by Beethoven and Bach. He used to attend many concerts and learnt to play the piano.

Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe was born on January 8, 1891, in Oranienburg, near Berlin, Germany, to Charlotte Hartung and Fredrich Bothe

Growing up, he showed a great interest in Physics. Between 1908 and 1912 Bothe studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as the Humboldt University of Berlin).

He studied under the tutelage of the famous physicist, Max Planck and excelled in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He became Planck’s teaching assistant in 1913. Just before the First World War broke out, he obtained his doctorate, in 1914, under Planck.

In 1913, he was offered a job at the Physikalische-Technische Reichsanstalt (presently known as Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt). He served there as a ‘Professor Extraordinary’ until 1930.

In 1914, after obtaining his doctorate, he proceeded to join the German cavalry. He was captured by the Russians and imprisoned for over 5 years in Siberia. During his captivity, he chose to study mathematics and also learnt to read and write Russian. He was released in 1920 and he returned to Germany.

Walther Bothe was an active theoretical and experimental physicist. He worked on the scattering of alpha and beta rays and devised a theory involving scattering at small angles.

He and Hans Geiger, in 1924, performed an experiment involving the wavelike properties of radiation. Both of them formulated a new quantum theory of radiation. He published his coincidence method and applied it to the study of nuclear reactions, the “Compton Effect”, and the wave-particle duality of light.

In 1925, while still at Physikalische-Technische Reichsanstalt, he became a ‘Privatdozent’ (denotes an ability to teach independently at university level. Later on in 1929, he became an ‘ausserordentlicher Professor’ (extraordinarius professor) there 1929.

His most famous work is the ‘Coincidence Circuit’ that works on the coincidence principle. Walther Bothe used two Geiger counters and studied the coincidences between scattered X-rays and recoiling electrons. The observations indicated a small scale conservation of energy and momentum. He also used this principle to show that cosmic rays act like particles.