Pascual Jordan

Jordan was born to Ernst Pasqual Jordan (1858–1924) and Eva Fischer. Ernst Jordan was a painter renowned for his portraits and landscapes. He was an associate professor of art at Hannover Technical University when his son was born. The family name was originally Jorda and it was of Spanish origin. The first born sons were all given the name Pasqual or the version Pascual. The family settled in Hannover after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and at some stage changed their name from Jorda to Jordan. Ernst Jordan married Eva Fischer in 1892. An ancestor of Pascual Jordan named Pascual Jordan was a Spanish nobleman and cavalry officer who served with the British during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Jordan eventually settled in Hannover. In those days the House of Hanover ruled the United Kingdom. The family name was eventually changed to Jordan (pronounced in the German manner, ). A family tradition held that the first-born son in each generation be named Pascual. Jordan was raised with a traditional religious upbringing. At age 12 he attempted to reconcile a literal interpretation of the Bible with Darwinian evolution; his teacher of religion convinced him there was no contradiction between science and religion (Jordan would write numerous articles on the relationship between the two throughout his life). for his doctorate. Jordan suffered a speech impairment throughout his life, often stuttering badly when giving unprepared remarks. In 1926, Niels Bohr offered to pay to treat it, and on the advice of Wilhelm Lenz, Jordan sought treatment at Alfred Adler's clinic in Vienna. ==Scientific work==

Together with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg, Jordan was a coauthor of an important series of papers on quantum mechanics. He went on to pioneer early quantum field theory Jordan algebras have been applied in projective geometry, number theory, complex analysis, optimization, and many other fields of pure and applied mathematics. In 1966, Jordan published his 182-page work Die Expansion der Erde. Folgerungen aus der Diracschen Gravitationshypothese (The expansion of the Earth. Conclusions from the Dirac gravitation hypothesis) in which he developed his theory that, according to Paul Dirac's hypothesis of a steady weakening of gravitation throughout the history of the universe, the Earth may have swollen to its current size, from an initial ball of a diameter of only about . This theory could explain why the ductile lower sima layer of the Earth's crust is of a comparatively uniform thickness, while the brittle upper sial layer of the Earth's crust had broken apart into the main continental plates. The continents having to adapt to the ever flatter surface of the growing ball, the mountain ranges on the Earth's surface would, in the course of that, have come into being as constricted folds. Despite the energy Jordan invested in the expanding Earth theory, his geological work was never taken seriously by either physicists or geologists. ==Political activities==

Germany's defeat in the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles had a profound effect on Jordan's political beliefs. While many of his colleagues believed the Treaty to be unjust, Jordan went much further and became increasingly nationalistic and right-wing. He wrote numerous articles in the late 1920s that propounded an aggressive and bellicose stance. He was an anti-communist and was particularly concerned about the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks. Jordan enlisted in the Luftwaffe in 1939 and worked as a weather analyst at the Peenemünde rocket center, for a while. During the war he attempted to interest the Nazi party in various schemes for advanced weapons. His suggestions were ignored because he was considered "politically unreliable", probably because of his past associations with Jews (in particular: Born, Richard Courant and Wolfgang Pauli) and the so-called "Jewish physics". Responding to Ludwig Bieberbach, Jordan wrote: "The differences among German and French mathematics are not any more essential than the differences between German and French machine guns." Wolfgang Pauli declared Jordan to be "rehabilitated" to the West German authorities some time after the war, allowing him to regain academic employment after a two-year period. In 1953, after a successful application for relief (including a salary subsidy) under Article 131, he recovered his full status as a tenured professor at the University of Hamburg, where he stayed until he became emeritus in 1971. Jordan went against Pauli's advice, and reentered politics after the period of denazification came to an end under the pressures of the Cold War. In 1957 he secured election to the Bundestag standing with the conservative Christian Democratic Union. In 1957 Jordan supported the arming of the Bundeswehr with tactical nuclear weapons by the Adenauer government, while the Göttingen Eighteen (a group of German physicists which included Born and Heisenberg) issued the Göttinger Manifest in protest. This and other issues were to further strain his relationships with his former friends and colleagues. ==Selected works==

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