Габриель Липпман: Люксембургтік-француз физигі және түсті фотосуреттеудің новаторы

French physicist born in Luxembourg

Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann (16 August 1845 – 13 July 1921) was a Franco Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. His parents were French Jews.

Gabriel Lippmann was born in Bonnevoie, Luxembourg (Luxembourgish: Bouneweg), on 16 August 1845. At the time, Bonnevoie was part of the commune of Hollerich (Luxembourgish: Hollerech), which is often given as his place of birth. (Both places, Bonnevoie and Hollerich, are now districts of Luxembourg City.) His father, Isaïe, a French Jew born in Ennery near Metz, managed the family glove making business at the former convent in Bonnevoie. In 1848, the family moved to Paris, where Lippmann was initially tutored by his mother, Miriam Rose (Lévy), before attending the Lycée Napoléon (now Lycée Henri IV). He was said to have been a rather inattentive but thoughtful pupil with a special interest in mathematics. In 1868, he was admitted to the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he failed the agrégation examination which would have enabled him to enter the teaching profession, preferring instead to study physics. In 1872, the French government sent him on a mission to Heidelberg University, where he was able to specialize in electricity with the encouragement of Gustav Kirchhoff, receiving a doctorate with "summa cum laude" distinction in 1874. Lippmann then returned to Paris in 1875, where he continued to study until 1878, when he became professor of physics at the Sorbonne. At the Sorbonne he was teaching acoustics and optics.

Lippmann made several important contributions to various branches of physics over the years.

One of Lippmann's early discoveries was the relationship between electrical and capillary phenomena, which allowed him to develop a sensitive capillary electrometer, subsequently known as the Lippmann electrometer which was used in the first ECG machine. In a paper delivered to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 17 January 1883, John G. M'Kendrick described the apparatus as follows:

Lippmann's electrometer consists of a tube of ordinary glass, 1 metre long and 7 millimetres in diameter, open at both ends, and kept in the vertical position by a stout support. The lower end is drawn into a capillary point, until the diameter of the capillary is .005 of a millimetre. The tube is filled with mercury, and the capillary point is immersed in dilute sulphuric acid (1 to 6 of water in volume), and in the bottom of the vessel containing the acid there is a little more mercury. A platinum wire is put into connection with the mercury in each tube, and, finally, arrangements are made by which the capillary point can be seen with a microscope magnifying 250 diameters. Such an instrument is very sensitive; and Lippmann states that it is possible to determine a difference of potential so small as that of one 10,080th of a Daniell. It is thus a very delicate means of observing and (as it can be graduated by a compensation method) of measuring minute electromotive forces. Lippmann's PhD thesis, presented to the Sorbonne on 24 July 1875, was on electrocapillarity.

In 1881, Lippmann predicted the converse piezoelectric effect.

Above all, Lippmann is remembered as the inventor of a method for reproducing colours by photography, based on the interference phenomenon, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1908. In practice, the Lippmann process was not easy to use. Extremely fine grained high resolution photographic emulsions are inherently much less light sensitive than ordinary emulsions, so long exposure times were required. With a lens of large aperture and a very brightly sunlit subject, a camera exposure of less than one minute was sometimes possible, but exposures measured in minutes were typical. Pure spectral colours reproduced brilliantly, but the ill defined broad bands of wavelengths reflected by real world objects could be problematic. The process did not produce colour prints on paper and it proved impossible to make a good duplicate of a Lippmann colour photograph by rephotographing it, so each image was unique. A very shallow angled prism was usually cemented to the front of the finished plate to deflect unwanted surface reflections, and this made plates of any substantial size impractical. The size of his early photographs was 4 cm by 4 cm, increased later to 6.5 cm by 9 cm. This principle of using numerous lenses or imaging apertures to record what was later termed a light field underlies the evolving technology of light field cameras and microscopes. When Lippmann presented the theoretical foundations of his "integral photography" in March 1908, it was impossible to accompany them with concrete results. At the time, the materials necessary for producing a lenticular screen with the proper optical qualities were lacking. In the 1920s, promising trials were made by Eugène Estanave, using glass Stanhope lenses, and by Louis Lumière, using celluloid. Lippmann's integral photography was the foundation of research on 3D and animated lenticular imagery and also on color lenticular processes.

In 1895, Lippmann evolved a method of eliminating the personal equation in measurements of time, using photographic registration, and he studied the eradication of irregularities of pendulum clocks, devising a method of comparing the times of oscillation of two pendulums of nearly equal period.

Lippmann was a member of the Academy of Sciences from 8 February 1886 until his death, serving as its president in 1912. In addition, he was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, a member of the Bureau des Longitudes, Lippmann was one of the founders of the Institut d'optique théorique et appliquée in France. Lippmann was the President of the Société Astronomique de France (SAF), the French astronomical society, from 1903–1904.

Lippmann was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour on 29 December 1881, promoted to Officer on 2 April 1894, to Commander on 14 December 1900, and to the dignity of Grand Officer on 6 December 1919. In Luxembourg City an Institute for fundamental scientific research was named after Lippmann (Centre de Recherche Public Gabriel Lippmann) which merged on 1 January 2015 with another major research centre to form the new Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology (LIST).

Lippmann married the daughter of the novelist Victor Cherbuliez in 1888.