This week 114 years ago, Shmuel Samborsky was born, a physicist, mathematician and historian of science, one of the founders of the physics department at the Hebrew University and the first director of the Israel Science Council.
This week 114 years ago, Shmuel Samborsky was born, a physicist, mathematician and historian of science, one of the founders of the physics department at the Hebrew University and the first director of the Israel Science Council.
Shmuel Samborski was the son of Menachem Samborski, the reporter of the newspaper "Hatzifira" and the chairman of the Zionist Organization in the city of Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad). He mastered German and Hebrew from his childhood (which his father taught him from a very young age, on the advice of Ahad Ha'am), and due to his excellence in his studies, he began studying at the universities of Königsberg and then Berlin when he was only 17 years old. Among his teachers were Max Planck and Max von Laue, one of the top German physicists at the time; Albert Einstein, who in those days was involved in the development and publication of the theory of general relativity, used to give guest lectures there, and in some of them, including the famous one ("Geometry and Experience"), Samborski was also present.
In 1924, after completing his doctorate studies, Samborsky immigrated to Israel, and began working as a mathematics and physics teacher at the Beit Midrash for David Yelin teachers and at the Hebrew Gymnasium.
In 1928 he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University as a senior research assistant for natural sciences and physics, and in 1931 he founded the physics department, where he worked until 1958. During the War of Independence he managed to move most of the laboratory equipment from Mount Scopus to the university's permanent residence in Givat Ram and thus in fact maintained its existence.
After the end of the war, he was appointed chairman of the Scientific Council of Israel and served in the position for about 8 years. In the early 50s he began to engage in the history of science: he wrote several books on the development of science and the various discoveries, from the time of the Greeks, through the time of Galileo and Newton to Einstein's discoveries, among them: "Constitutions of Heaven and Earth: The Cosmos of the Greeks", "Newton in the Eyes of Einstein", "Physics of the 17th century" and more. In 1962 he was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in the same year he inaugurated the university's programs broadcast on Network B. In 1968 he was awarded the Israel Prize for his life's work.
His younger brother was the composer Daniel Samborski, who composed, among others, the songs "Singer of the Companies", "Shir Ha'emek", and "Shir Hirot".
Shmuel Samborsky - on the website of the Academy of Sciences
