Stern, Otto (stûrn, Ger. ôˈtō shtĕrn) [key], 1888–1969, American physicist, b. Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Breslau, 1912. After resigning from his post at the Univ. of Hamburg in 1933, he became professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and later professor emeritus at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. Stern was an outstanding experimental physicist; his contributions included development of the molecular-beam method, discovery of space quantization (with Gerlach, 1922), measurement of atomic magnetic moments, demonstration of the wave nature of atoms and molecules, and discovery of the proton's magnetic moment. He was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
More on Otto Stern from Fact Monster:
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Physics: Biographies