Physics in Amsterdam: A Chronicle, 1632 to the Present

The roots of physics at the University of Amsterdam go back to the Athenaeum Illustre, founded by the city in 1632. For more than two centuries it offered respected academic teaching in mathematics, physics and astronomy. It could not award degrees, however, and by the mid-nineteenth century Amsterdam, the country's largest city, found it harder and harder to accept having no university of its own. The Higher Education Act of 1876 resolved this. In 1877 the Athenaeum became the Municipal University of Amsterdam, with a Faculty of Mathematics and Physics that more than doubled its number of professors.

The new faculty made remarkable appointments. Alongside the physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals, it appointed the chemist Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and the botanist Hugo de Vries, and all three went on to make fundamental breakthroughs. A new Physics Laboratory on the Plantage Muidergracht was completed for Van der Waals in 1883, although it only received electricity in 1894. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1910 for his work on gases and liquids. Pieter Zeeman, who discovered the effect that bears his name, received the Nobel Prize in 1902 and later moved into a laboratory built to his own specifications.

During the interwar years, Anton Michels built the Van der Waals Laboratory into a world centre for precise high-pressure measurements. Jacob Clay, meanwhile, turned the Physics Laboratory into an internationally recognised centre for cosmic-ray research. The German occupation brought academic life to a standstill in 1941. After the war, however, Amsterdam physicists moved quickly to catch up in nuclear physics. They played a central role in founding the Institute for Nuclear Physics Research (IKO), the Laboratory for Mass Spectrography that later became AMOLF, and, in 1975, Nikhef, the Dutch national institute for subatomic physics.

The postwar decades brought great breadth. Jan de Boer built up the Institute for Theoretical Physics from scratch. Experimental research expanded into magnetic materials, pulsed magnetic fields of up to 40 tesla, medical physics, atomic hydrogen and quantum gases, the transport of light through disordered media, and soft matter. The university also changed profoundly around the research, through democratisation in 1970, rapid growth in student numbers, and successive reorganisations. In 2009 theoretical and experimental physics were rehoused together at Amsterdam Science Park, where they now work alongside Nikhef, AMOLF and other partners.

This chronicle traces that history through the people who made it, drawing on archives, obituaries and earlier historical studies. Its highlights include:

• a vivid account of the bitter five-year struggle over Zeeman's succession in the 1930s, a contest in which Frits Zernike, Hendrik Casimir and Cor Gorter all featured
• the story of the 27.5-metre mercury column that Michels installed in the seventeenth-century Westertoren as a pressure standard
• Clay's shipboard measurements between the Netherlands and Java, which showed that cosmic rays consist of charged particles
• the contribution of Henk van der Tweel and Frank Muller to Amsterdam's pioneering school of cardiology
• Isaac Silvera and Jook Walraven's work on atomic hydrogen, which helped pave the way for quantum gases
• the careers of more recent figures, such as Robbert Dijkgraaf, Erik Verlinde, Albert Polman and Florian Schreck, whose group created the world's first continuous Bose-Einstein condensate
• Amsterdam's contributions to the discovery of the Higgs boson, to gravitational-wave research, and to early work on quantum computing that led to QuSoft

The chronicle also sets these developments in a wider context. It describes the major changes in Dutch university law and governance from 1815 onwards, discusses the role of PhD supervisors, lists the deans of physics over time, and reflects on how the university has changed since 1950. Together, these chapters offer a rich portrait of nearly 150 years of physics at the UvA, and of the institutions and personalities behind it.