Wolfgang Kundt

Wolfgang Kundt (born 3 June 1931 in Hamburg) is a German astrophysicist.

Wolfgang Kundt, 2017

He studied Theoretical Physics in Hamburg, centered on general relativity, and got his diploma in 1956, ph.d. in 1959, advised by Pascual Jordan.

With Jürgen Ehlers and Engelbert Schücking, Kundt collaborated in a joint seminar, known as Hamburg's 'Jordan Seminar' on general relativity. In 1965, he habilitated at Hamburg on "Canonical Quantisation of gauge-invariant Field Theories",[1] and was subsequently Lecturer and - since 1971 - 'Scientific Adviser and Professor' at the University of Hamburg.[2] When Jordan had reached retirement age, in 1977, Wolfgang Priester called him to the University of Bonn, where he remained active beyond his own retirement, in 1996, until today. During his career, his scientific interests expanded to include astrophysics, geophysics, and biophysics.

Kundt was a visiting researcher at the following universities and research institutes: in Syracuse (N.Y.,1959), Pittsburgh (Pa.,1966 ), CERN (1972), Bielefeld (1973), Kiel(1974), Hamburg (1975-76), Kyoto (Japan, 1978), Boston (1986), Bangalore (1987), Linz (1999), Hsinchu (Taiwan, 2002), Maribor (Slovenia, 2004), Rio de Janeiro (2008, 2010, 2012), Buenos Aires (2012), and Gonder (Ethiopia, 2015).

During the years 1969-1979, he also conducted the (passive) celestial mechanics experiment E11 of the German-American spacecraft project HELIOS, which for technical reasons had to be eventually sacrificed to the ten active experiments on board.

Besides Jordan and Ehlers, he had scientific contacts with (in historical order): Klaus Hasselmann, Wolfgang Pauli, Roger Penrose, Peter Bergmann, Thomas Gold, John A. Wheeler, Felix Pirani, Brandon Carter, Hermann Bondi, Rolf Hagedorn, Nigel Holloway, Nino Zichichi, Peter Scheuer, Richard Feynman, Malvin Ruderman, Philip Morrison, David Layzer, Zdenek Kopal, John Maddox, and Paul Dirac.

In 1984, Zichichi asked him to direct yearly courses at Erice,[3][4] on 'neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, and jets'.

His scientific interests thereby moved from gravitational waves (of general relativity) to neutron stars black holes and accretion disks, to the astrophysical jets, to supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts, further to terrestrial plate tectonics, to the Tunguska event (1908), and to the osmotically pumped water circulation in plants. With these widely spaced interests, he followed his teacher Pascual Jordan, and decades-long friend Thomas Gold – both known for their often "alternative" interpretations – they influenced his more than 300 publications, among them an article entitled "The Gold Effect: Odyssey of Scientific Research" (1998)[5] and the two books "Astrophysics, a new approach" [6](2005), and "Physikalische Mythen auf dem Prüfstand"[7] (2014).

In his publications since 1978, Kundt has increasingly expressed doubts about the existence of black holes. They are a scientific error. If they existed, they would have swallowed us long ago, he claims. Rather, he believes that the cores of large galaxies are hydrogen-rich, nuclear-burning plasma disks.  He calls them Burning Discs (BD). He recently confirmed this in two interviews that Alexander Unzicker conducted with him as part of his series "Real Physics Talk".

A new explanation has been given by Wolfgang Kundt in his 1999 analysis of the Tunguska event based on the facts collected by Moscow's Andrei Olchowatow, as the present-day formation of a kimberlite, in which ten megatons of methane were explosively ejected, whose icy remnants in the upper atmosphere caused three bright nights to follow in Europe.

As already mentioned above astrophysical jets are one of the focal points of his scientific work. Already in 2004, together with Gopal Krishna, he succeeded in a unified, analytical description of all jet types, independent of their size, independent of the reception of optical and/or X-ray emission lines, only very rarely branching, in almost pressure-free, but sometimes also extreme high pressure regions of the cosmos, starting at supersonic speed, but often switching into the subsonic range.

He is married since 1966, and has a daughter (Liane), and a son (Rasko).