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Blank and Missing People, #54 (Continued from yesterday’s post.)
I wonder who the missing man is in this photograph of the
great 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics?
Ernest Solvay (1838-1922), a wealthy industrialist who funded the event,
was absent when this photo was made, but is certainly pictured here, seated
between Brillouin and Lorentz. If you
look closely you can see that M. Solvay’s head is far larger than it should be,
the result of a poor paste-up of a darkroom artist who fit Solvay’s head over
the torso of a sit-in for the sponsor. I
wonder who this bow-tied fellow was, and what he was thinking about sitting
there in the midst of such high-caliber intellectual firepower.
Invited attendees for the 1911
Solvay Conference at the Hotel Metropole. included Seated
(L-R): W. Nernst, M.
Brillouin, E. Solvay, H.
Lorentz, E. Warburg, J. Perrin, W. Wien,
M. Curie,
and H. Poincaré. Standing (L-R): R. Goldschmidt, M. Planck,
H.
Rubens, A. Sommerfeld, F. Lindemann, M. de Broglie, M.
Knudsen, F. Hasenöhrl, G. Hostelet, E. Herzen, J.H. Jeans, E.
Rutherford, H. Kamerlingh Onnes, A.
Einstein and P. Langevin.