Stark, Johannes

(born April 15, 1874, Schickenhof, Ger.—died June 21, 1957, Traunstein, W. Ger.) German physicist who won the 1919 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery in 1913 that an electric field would cause splitting of the lines in the spectrum of light emitted by a luminous substance; the phenomenon is called the Stark effect.

Stark became a lecturer at the University of Göttingen in 1900, and from 1917 until he retired in 1922, he was a professor of physics at the University of Greifswald and, later, at the University of Würzburg. A supporter of Adolf Hitler and an anti-Semitic racial theorist, Stark was president of the Reich Physical-Technical Institute from 1933 to 1939. In 1947 a denazification court sentenced him to four years in a labour camp.

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