弗雷德里克·索迪1877—1956

生平

生于英国伊斯特本，化学家，1922年获1921年度的诺贝尔化学奖，在英国布赖顿去世。

由于认识到原子能的潜在巨大能量在现今经济思想和制度条件下可能被用于世界战争，于是自20世纪20年代开始，弗雷德里克·索迪转向研究经济学，以期改变人类经济系统，不致使将要被获得的原子能毁灭人类生态系统。《财富、虚拟财富及负债》是他的主要经济学著作。他猛烈批评了银行体系和货币制度，被称为“怪人”而遭到主流经济学家的嘲笑。著名的美国生态经济学家赫尔曼·E·戴利把弗雷德里克·索迪称为可持续发展经济学的先驱之一。

Frederick Soddy FRS (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes". Soddy was a polymath who mastered chemistry, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, finance, and economics.

Biography

Soddy was born at 6 Bolton Road, Eastbourne, England, the son of Benjamin Soddy, corn merchant, and his wife Hannah Green. He went to school at Eastbourne College, before going on to study at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and at Merton College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1898 with first class honours in chemistry. He was a researcher at Oxford from 1898 to 1900.

Scientific career

In 1900, he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he worked with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity.

He and Rutherford realized that the anomalous behaviour of radioactive elements was because they decayed into other elements.

This decay also produced alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. When radioactivity was first discovered, no one was sure what the cause was. It needed careful work by Soddy and Rutherford to prove that atomic transmutation was in fact occurring.

In 1903, with Sir William Ramsay at University College London, Soddy showed that the decay of radium produced helium gas. In the experiment a sample of radium was enclosed in a thin-walled glass envelope sited within an evacuated glass bulb.

Economics

In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a "campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships", offering a perspective on economics rooted in physics – the laws of thermodynamics, in particular – and was "roundly dismissed as a crank". While most of his proposals – "to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort" – are now conventional practice, his critique of fractional-reserve banking still "remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom" although a recent paper by the IMF reinvigorated his proposals.

Political views

In Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, Soddy cited the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which had been widely disseminated by Henry Ford in the United States, as evidence that the belief in a "financial conspiracy to enslave the world" was widespread at the time. He further wrote that "conscious conspiracy or not... a corrupt monetary system strikes at the very life of the nation". Later in life he published a pamphlet Abolish Private Money, or Drown in Debt (1939).

The influence of his writing can be gauged, for example, in this quote from Ezra Pound:

Professor Frederick Soddy states that the Gold Standard monetary system has wrecked a scientific age!... The world's bankers... have not been content to take their share of modern wealth production – great as it has been – but they have refused to allow the masses of mankind to receive theirs.

Descartes' theorem

He rediscovered Descartes' theorem in 1936 and published it as a poem, "The Kiss Precise", quoted at Problem of Apollonius. The kissing circles in this problem are sometimes known as Soddy circles.

Honours and awards

He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 and the same year was elected member of the International Atomic Weights Committee. A small crater on the far side of the Moon as well as the radioactive uranium mineral soddyite are named after him. The author H. G. Wells dedicated his novel The World Set Free to Soddy's Interpretation of Radium (1909).

Personal life

In 1908, Soddy married Winifred Moller Beilby (1885–1936), the daughter of industrial chemist Sir George Beilby and Lady Emma Bielby, a philanthropist to women's causes. The couple worked together and co-published a paper in 1910 on the absorption of gamma rays from radium. He died in Brighton, England in 1956, twenty days after his 79th birthday.