PETERLIN, Anton

After graduating from the secondary modern school in Ljubljana, P. studied mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Arts from 1926 to 1930. After spending four years as an assistant at the Institute of Physics of the University of Ljubljana, he went to the Humboldt University of Berlin and to the Max Planck Institute in Dahlem between 1937 and 1939 to further educate himself. Here he received his doctorate in 1938, with a dissertation on the viscosity of a dilute solution of ellipsoidal particles.
Upon his return, he became employed at the Faculty of Technology, and in 1940 became an assistant professor at the Chair of Physics at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. The promotion to full professor, expected in 1942, was prevented by the beginning of the war. It was only after several years in prison, where he had been sent by German occupying forces, that P. could become a university professor of physics in 1946. The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts elected him a full member in 1949.
During the 1950s, nuclear technology was mostly in the foreground of different branches of physics, due to the planned building of a nuclear power plant. P. acted as a pioneer in this field, and included the technology of nuclear reactors in the university study programme. However, since he did not accept a simultaneous reduction of the scope of other research programmes, he was forced to leave the university in 1960. At first, P. went to the Technical University of Munich, and in 1961 to the USA, where he took over the management of the Camille Dreyfus Laboratory in Durham (North Carolina). At the same time, he also taught at Duke University in Durham as a professor of polymer physics, and at Cleveland University (Ohio) as a guest professor. In 1937, he became employed at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington; two years later, he became an assistant to the head of the Polymer Department and worked there until his retirement in 1984.
P. worked all his life on the fundamental research into liquids and solutions, particularly on hydrodynamics, and the optics of molecules and dilute solutions. The Dreyfus Laboratory and his post in Washington, where they specialised in polymer research, therefore offered him the best possible conditions. The discoveries of his research were of special importance in the development of plastics, rubber, etc.
P.'s bibliography contains around 360 scientific and 80 popular science works. From 1973 onwards, he was a member of the Washington Academy of Sciences, and from 1974 onwards, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.