Guido Beck

Guido Beck (August 29, 1903 – 1989) was a physicist born in what was then the town of Reichenberg in Austria-Hungary, and is now Liberec in the Czech Republic. He studied physics in Vienna and received his doctorate in 1925, under Hans Thirring. He worked in Leipzig in 1928 as an assistant to Werner Heisenberg. A combination of the troubled political climate of Europe in the 1930s, his own restlessness, and the Nazi persecutions in Germany, made the Jewish-born Beck a traveller in those years. He worked in Prague, the United States, the former Soviet Union (at Odessa University, 1935-1937), and finally France, where he was imprisoned when World War II broke out. In 1941, he fled to Portugal, and in 1943 he emigrated to Argentina.

In Argentina, he was instrumental in training several Argentinian physicists, including José Antonio Balseiro, and had a profound impact in developing physics in Argentina. He moved once more, this time to Brazil, in 1951, where his influence in developing physics was also great.

He was called back to Argentina in 1962, after the death of Balseiro, and continued his work at the Instituto Balseiro.

In 1975 he returned to Brazil, and worked in the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF) until his death in 1989.

Apart from his influence as a teacher in South America he contributed to a theory of beta-decay, which was later superseded by a more complete theory by Fermi.He was a friend of the famous writer Ernesto Sabato.

Honours

*In 1977 he was given the doctoral degree of honour by the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany "for his exemplary activity as an academic teacher and his relentless efforts in establishing research institutions in physics".