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Concept
Felix Bloch
Summary
Felix Bloch (23 October 1905 – 10 September 1983) was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of new ways and methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements." In 1954–1955, he served for one year as the first director-general of CERN. Felix Bloch made fundamental theoretical contributions to the understanding of ferromagnetism and electron behavior in crystal lattices. He is also considered one of the developers of nuclear magnetic resonance.
Bloch was born in Zürich, Switzerland to Jewish parents Gustav and Agnes Bloch. Gustav Bloch, his father, was financially unable to attend University and worked as a wholesale grain dealer in Zürich. Gustav moved to Zürich from Moravia in 1890 to become a Swiss citizen. Their first child was a girl born in 1902 while Felix was born three years later.
Bloch entered public elementary school at the age of six and is said to have been teased, in part because he "spoke Swiss German with a somewhat different accent than most members of the class". He received support from his older sister during much of this time, but she died at the age of twelve, devastating Felix, who is said to have lived a "depressed and isolated life" in the following years. Bloch learned to play the piano by the age of eight and was drawn to arithmetic for its "clarity and beauty". Bloch graduated from elementary school at twelve and enrolled in the Cantonal Gymnasium in Zürich for secondary school in 1918. He was placed on a six-year curriculum here to prepare him for University. He continued his curriculum through 1924, even through his study of engineering and physics in other schools, though it was limited to mathematics and languages after the first three years. After these first three years at the Gymnasium, at age fifteen Bloch began to study at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETHZ), also in Zürich. Although he initially studied engineering he soon changed to physics.
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