Georg Zundel (May 17, 1931 – March 11, 2007) was a German physicist, entrepreneur, and peace politics committed philanthropist.
Georg Zundel was born in 1931 as the only son of Georg Friedrich Zundel and Paula Zundel. He became a physicist and gained an international reputation especially in hydrogen bonding research. He founded companies and was always committed to agriculture and forestry. Peace politics, Georg Zundel was particularly involved through the establishment of the Berghof Foundation, Foundation for Conflict Research, for which he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2003. Zundel was married and had three children. He lived with his family in Salzburg until his death in 2007. His grave is located in Haisterkirch near Bad Waldsee.
Childhood and youth
Georg Zundel spent his childhood and youth on his parents' estate, the "Berghof" near Tübingen, and on the family farm in Haisterkirch, Bad Waldsee. His appreciation of agriculture stemmed from this experience in times of food shortages. At the same time, Zundel was confronted at a young age by an environment marked by political and economic tensions through his parental home. His mother Paula Zundel was the daughter of the entrepreneur Robert Bosch. His father Georg Friedrich Zundel was married in his first marriage to the women's rights activist Clara Zetkin. As a painter of large-scale workers' portraits, he had caused a sensation at the turn of the 20th century. Due to the war, Georg Zundel was not able to graduate from high school until 1952, whereupon he began studies in physics at Universität München. Before and during his studies, he traveled through Italy and Greece by motorcycle in 1951 and 1952. In 1955, he and a friend conducted a nine-month journey in a converted Unimog from Stuttgart via Afghanistan to India and back.
Scientific career
After interrupting his physics studies, which he had begun in Munich in 1955/56, for a study visit to Frankfurt am Main, Zundel received his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1961. There he was also habilitated in 1967 and appointed university lecturer in 1972. From 1974 to 2006, he was an associate professor of biophysical chemistry at the University of Munich. During this time he supervised 39 doctoral students.
As a scientist, he contributed to hydrogen bonding research, with the "Zundel cation" H5O2+ being one of his most famous discoveries. His scientific work includes over 300 publications in international journals on topics of physical chemistry and biophysics.
The focus is on hydrogen bonds and their investigation using the infrared spectroscopy method. Depending on the bond strength of the acceptor and donor side, such bridges show up in the infrared spectrum over several hundred wavenumbers (3500 to under 650 cm−1) or between wavelengths of 2.7 and over 10 micrometers a continuous absorption. It is attributed to the fact that the bridging protons, caused by the easy polarizability of the charge between the donor and acceptor side, cover a broad spectrum of absorption frequencies in the fluctuating environment in the infrared wavelength range. The absorption is observed both in aqueous acidic solutions, whereby the H5O2+ ions that are formed are the basic unit, and in alkaline solutions , where it is the charge fluctuations in the H3O2− structure. Furthermore, continuously absorbing bridges are also observed in biological systems, where proton donor and acceptor can exist in different forms, for example between the nitrogen atom of a amine group and the oxygen atom of a phosphate group.
Transcending the boundaries of the Cold War, Zundel always understood science as a universal task. In the early 1960s, he was one of the first exchange researchers at a natural science institute in Moscow. Soon after, his postdoctoral thesis "Hydration and Intermolecular Interaction. Infrared Investigations with Polyelectrolyte Membranes" in both English and Russian. At the beginning of the 1970s, he intensified his cooperation, especially with Polish colleagues, for which he was appointed honorary member of the "Polish Chemical Society" in 1985.