Gaál Sándor (born 8 October 1885 in Gogánváralja,

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

, died 28 July 1972) was a Hungarian accelerator physicist and an alleged co-inventor of the

cyclotron A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Januar ...

. Most credible international sources give the credit of the invention of the cyclotron to American physicist and Nobel Laureate Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron during the spring of 1929 and built the first operational cyclotron in 1930 while at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. In November 1939, Ernest O. Lawrence was awarded the

Nobel Prize in Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...

for his work on the cyclotron and its applications. In his main work, "Fizica teoretica" (Bucuresti, 1957, vol. I, p. 270) Teofil Vescan, professor of Bolyai University in Kolozsvár (

Cluj Cluj-Napoca ( ; ), or simply Cluj ( , ), is a city in northwestern Romania. It is the second-most populous city in the country and the seat of Cluj County. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest (), Budapest () and Belgrade ( ...

) revealed that Gaál Sándor may have described the cyclotron's working at about the same time as Ernest O. Lawrence during the spring of 1929. In 1929 Gaál allegedly sent a study, with the title ''Die Kaskadenröhre. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Atomkernzerstrümmerung'' to the physics periodical ''

Zeitschrift für Physik ''Zeitschrift für Physik'' (English: ''Journal for Physics'') is a defunct series of German peer-reviewed physics journals established in 1920 by Springer Berlin Heidelberg. The series ended publication in 1997, when it merged with other journal ...

''. The paper registered the study as of 6 May 1929 but it was not printed because the editors missed the topic of the study and erroneously thought that it dealt with

particle accelerator A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel electric charge, charged particles to very high speeds and energies to contain them in well-defined particle beam, beams. Small accelerators are used for fundamental ...

s, a problem already solved in 1928 by Norwegian physicist Rolf Wideröe. Gaál died in poverty in Csernát,

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

References

* T. T. Vescan: ''Fizica teoretică'' (in Romanian) 1957. vol. I. 270 pp. * Szőcs Huba László: Gaál Sándor, a polihisztor, ''Műszaki Szemle'' 46 (''Historia Scientiarum'' 6), 2009. (in Hungarian with an English abstract)
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20th-century Hungarian physicists Hungarian physicists Accelerator physicists 1885 births 1972 deaths {{Physicist-stub