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Memorial Tributes Volume 20 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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HENDRIK B.G. CASIMIR
Pages 58-65

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From page 59...
... As a student of Paul Ehrenfest, he studied theoretical physics. He also spent 18 months of his graduate education in Copenhagen as a student of Ehrenfest's close friend Niels Bohr.
From page 60...
... At the time he was actively studying both heat conduction and electrical conduction, and contributed to the attainment of millikelvin temperatures. In 1942, during World War II, Casimir moved to the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, because of the pressure of the German occupation forces on Leiden University as an active research center.
From page 61...
... In the constrained space between the two parallel metal plates fewer zero-point fluctuation waves can arise than outside of the parallel plates where there is more "volume"; between the plates only short wavelength waves can exist, whereas outside all waves exist. The net effect is an attraction between the plates with an inverse dependence on the fourth power of the distance between the plates.
From page 62...
... In this effort, he drew on his impressive fluency in several languages and his deep conviction that "research is essentially an international activity, and…repetition and duplication are useless! " At Philips he did not put many restricting boundary conditions on suggestions for programs of work, provided they were potentially of interest to Philips and not merely, as he put it, "advanced classroom experiments." He stimulated people with knowledgeable hints for progress in widely diverging fields, avoiding short-term interference with their affairs.
From page 63...
... problem of the onset of superfluorescence (giant collective fast emission from initially excited [inverted] atoms with no classical dipole moments)
From page 64...
... His wife died at the age of 100 in 2011. With the death of Henk Casimir, we lost one of the most gifted scientists and industrial research leaders of the 20th century.


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