Emil Rupp

Philipp Heinrich Emil Rupp (1 July 1898 – 10 April 1979) was a German physicist, regarded by many as a respectable and important experimentalist in the late 1920s.Jeroen van Dongen: Emil Rupp, Albert Einstein and the Canal Ray Experiments on Wave–Particle Duality: Scientific Fraud and Theoretical Bias. In: Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37 Suppl. (2007), 73–120

/ref> He was later forced to recant all five of the papers he had published in 1935, admitting that his findings and experiments had been fictions. There is evidence that most if not all of his earlier experimental results were forged as well.

Canal ray experiments

In 1926 Rupp's anode ray, canal ray experiments seemed to corroborate Albert Einstein's theories on wave–particle duality. He published these results in a paper that was printed next to a theoretical paper on the same subject by Einstein, who evidently accepted Rupp's alleged findings as confirming his (Einstein's) theoretical model. Rupp's experimental results were later shown to have been falsified (although subsequent experimental work re-confirmed Einstein's model).

Exposure of fraud

Although the validity of Rupp's experimental results had been challenged by other workers in the field repeatedly throughout his career, it was not until 1935 that his misdeeds were fully exposed. In 1935 experimentalists Walther Gerlach and Eduard Rüchardt published a corrected version of Einstein's mirror diagram in an article that argued that Rupp had falsely claimed to have carried out the rotated mirror experiment. Some fellow physicists at the AEG labs grew suspicious of Rupp when he claimed having accelerated protons at 500 kV, something he could not have the technical facilities to achieve. Rupp had to publicly retract five publications from the previous year. He attached a psychiatric diagnosis by that said he had written them under the influence of "dreamlike states" caused by psychasthenia. Rupp never worked again as a physicist, and all other physicists ceased to refer to any of his alleged results.

See also

* List of experimental errors and frauds in physics

References

Further reading

* French, A.P.: "The strange case of Emil Rupp", Physics in Perspective, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 3–21 (1999) (abstract)
* van Dongen, Jeroen: "Emil Rupp, Albert Einstein and the Canal Ray Experiments on Wave–Particle Duality: Scientific Fraud and Theoretical Bias", Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37 Suppl. (2007), 73–120.
* van Dongen, Jeroen: "The interpretation of the Einstein-Rupp experiments and their influence on the history of quantum mechanics", Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 37 Suppl. (2007), 121–131.


summary of original documents which also includes a letter (in German) from Arnold Sommerfeld to Rupp, requesting details of an experiment on electron refraction, 30 January 1930

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rupp, Emil
German nuclear physicists
German fraudsters
Academic scandals
Atomic physics
1898 births
1979 deaths
People involved in scientific misconduct incidents