Henry Herman Leopold Adolph Brose (15 September 1890 – 24 February 1965) was an Australian physicist and translator. During the First World War, he was interned as a civilian prisoner in Germany. He was the first Australian to be awarded a PhD from the University of Oxford. Brose held the Lancaster-Spencer Chair of Physics at the University of Nottingham from 1931 to 1935, and he translated a number of key physics texts from German into English. His translations of crucial German texts on Einstein's theory of General Relativity have been essential for the theory's reception in the English-speaking world. In 1935, Brose moved to Australia where he engaged in cancer research. During the Second World War, suspected of sympathy with the Nazi regime, he was interned in Australia from 1940 to 1943, which ended his academic career.
Life Born in Adelaide, Brose attended Prince Alfred College and graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1910 with a B.Sc. in mathematics. A member of the Adelaide University Athletics Club, Brose was awarded a University Blue for Athletics in 1910. In 1911-12 he taught French at Prince Alfred College, and in 1913 was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for South Australia. Brose went up to Christ Church, Oxford to study mathematics.
Ruhleben Internment Camp While visiting relatives in Hamburg in 1914, he was arrested by the German authorities and interned at Ruhleben, outside Berlin, as a civilian prisoner for the duration of the First World War. During his captivity Brose became interested in Einstein's Theory of Relativity, realised its significance and, while he was still at Ruhleben, started translating two books on General Relativity that had just recently appeared: philosopher Moritz Schlick's Space and Time in Contemporary Physics and astronomer Erwin Freundlich's The foundations of Einstein's Theory of Gravitation. Brose also participated in educational activities organised by Ruhleben internees. Scholars from different fields used to give lectures in the camp, organised in the open air. Brose lectured on the dynamics of particles, hydrodynamics, and differential and integral calculus. By 1917, conditions in the camp had increasingly exhausted his constitution. Brose was suffering from serious health problems. Help was provided from outside: a German business man, whom he knew from Adelaide, arranged a meeting with the Hamburg Consul Arnold Gumprecht, in whose house Brose was finally allowed to spend the last year of the war, on 'release on parole' and tutoring the consul's children in English. There, his health recovered, and he dedicated his spare time to studies and translations.
Oxford 1919-1925 In spring 1919, Brose returned to Oxford. In June of the same year, he was awarded simultaneous B.A. and M.A. degrees, following special decrees. He went on to do research on spectrophotometry at the Clarendon Laboratory, headed by Frederick Alexander Lindemann who also agreed to supervise Brose's doctoral work entitled 'A critical study of the development of the theory of relativity'. During the war, contacts between the scientific communities of the belligerent countries had broken down; as a consequence, not more than a handful of English physicists had so far even heard about Einstein's gravitational theory. Lindemann was delighted with Brose's knowledge and arranged for him to give a lecture on General Relativity to the Science Colloquium at the Clarendon. Encouraged by the physiologist John Scott Haldane (who had been in the audience), Brose went on to publish his lecture by the title: The Theory of Relativity: An Introductory Sketch based on Einstein's Original Writings (Blackwell, Oxford 1919). Ever since his return to England, Brose had tried hard to publish his translations of Erwin Freundlich's and Moritz Schlick's texts. But wartime memories were still vivid, and relations between the scholarly communities of the formerly belligerent countries were strained. In a first attempt - and despite the support of such renowned scientists as Lindemann, Arthur Stanley Eddington, and the Oxford astronomer Herbert Hall Turner - Brose was unable to find a publisher willing to publish a German scientist's text. This changed in November 1919, when the results of the Eddington experiment were made public, confirming Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
General Relativity in the English-speaking world: Brose's translations During the war, the Cambridge astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington had learned about Einstein's new theory through the Dutch physicist Willem de Sitter. Together with Frank Watson Dyson, he had mounted expeditions for putting one of its predictions - the deflection of light in a gravitational field - to the test, on the occasion of the eclipse of May 1919. The famous official statement was at the joint meeting of the Astronomical Society and Royal Society at Burlington House on November 6, 1919. Brose attended the meeting as Turner’s guest, Lindemann was one of the speakers. The announcement led to intensive press coverage in England and the US and provoked an enormous public interest. At this time, popular books on the new theory were badly needed. No less than six Brose-translations on General Relativity were put into the hands of English readers between 1920 and 1924: Freundlich’s The foundations of Einstein's Theory of Gravitation appeared in March 1920, Moritz Schlick's Space and Time in Contemporary Physics in April 1920, Alexander Moszkowski’s Einstein the searcher: his work explained from dialogues with Einstein in 1921, Hermann Weyl's Space, Time, Matter in 1922, and finally, in 1924, Erwin Freundlich's The Theory of Relativity: Three Lectures for Chemists and Max Born's Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Brose's own small pamphlet The Theory of Relativity: An Introductory Sketch based on Einstein's Original Writings, first published by Blackwell in November 1919, was published in five editions in only four months. It was later reprinted as an essay in the second and third edition of Freundlich’s book The foundations of Einstein's Theory of Gravitation. In addition to his works on General Relativity, Brose published his translations of Fritz Reiche's The Quantum Theory in 1922 (translated together with the chemist and inventor H.S.Hatfield whom he knew from Ruhleben camp), and of Arnold Sommerfeld's Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines in 1923.
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