A Swiss universal genius

If his father Fridolin Zwicky had had his way, the young Fritz, who was born in Varna on February 14, 1898, would have taken over the family textile business in Bulgaria. Zwicky senior emigrated from Mollis in Glarus to the Black Sea in 1886 and sold, among other things, Glarner Tuechli.

But things turned out differently: at the age of six, the parents sent their son to his grandparents in Switzerland so that he could go to school there. It soon became clear that the young man would not become a textile merchant. Instead, he turned to science.

Fritz Zwicky studied mathematics and experimental physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. All his life he was not an easy person to get along with and raised the blood pressure of his teachers with his often know-it-all attitude. When he obtained his doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Applied Sciences in 1922 ETH graduate, this was just the beginning of his long scientific journey.

In 1925, the 27-year-old emigrated to the US. He was famous California Institute of Technology (Caltech) invited to research and work in California. There he regularly shook up the world of science. For example, through the discovery of Dark matter or the theory of stellar explosions, the so-called Supernovasthat he developed together with the German astrophysicist Walter Baade.

Zwicky’s ideas always made people shake their heads and were ridiculed by many scientists. But the man from Glarus was not deterred and was often right. Even though this was sometimes only proven years or decades later.

After the end of World War II, Fritz Zwicky, one of the few scientists in the US who spoke German, was given an explosive assignment: as a military advisor he was to investigate the Nazi rocket development stations in Peenemünde and on the island of Usedom. The Americans wanted to close the technical gap with the Germans as quickly as possible. Whose V2 rockets were better than anything the US had developed at the time.

He later traveled to Japan to investigate the effects of the atomic bombs dropped there by the Americans. Fritz Zwicky was deeply affected by the destructive power of the bombs.

Nevertheless, rocket technology never left him. The researcher was convinced that Earth’s gravity could be overcome. To do this, he wanted to shoot an object into space. The test began in December 1946. A rocket with six rifle grenades in the tip was detonated. The grenades would later explode, shooting the steel balls into space outside of gravity. But the attempt failed because the grenades did not ignite.

Since Fritz Zwicky did not receive a new rocket from the USA for cost reasons, the scientist had to abandon this project, although he was convinced that his idea would work. The astrophysicist, considered eccentric, lived increasingly isolated and was shunned, underestimated and his ideas often denied by many colleagues. Moreover, rockets and bombs were quickly forgotten in the 1950s because the war was over and humanity wanted to enjoy life in the emerging prosperity.

But October 4, 1957 changed everything. That day the Soviets shot down the satellite sputnik into orbit and shocked the US.

Now the topics of space travel and rockets were back on the political agenda and Fritz Zwicky was suddenly in demand again. He became a military advisor again and suddenly it was very easy to get a rocket for testing, because in the eyes of the US, supremacy in space had to be won at all costs.

Just 12 days after Sputnik, Fritz Zwicky shot the first artificial object “Artificial Planet No. Zero”, a steel ball, into space and was able to finish what he started in 1946. And the universal genius already had the following steps in mind: «First we throw something small in the air. Then a boat full of instruments, and finally ourselves.” He should be right and his theories and analyzes should contribute to this important step of humanity into space.

Fritz Zwicky died in 1974 in Pasadena, California, and was buried in his home community of Mollis in Glarus. The list of his discoveries and ideas is long; there is not enough space to display them fully here. What is certain is that Fritz Zwicky was one of the greatest astrophysicists of the 20th century. And it is also certain that to this day he remains one of the most underrated scientists in the world.