Frederick Alexander Lindemann
Frederick Alexander Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell FRS PC CH (5 April 1886 – 3 July 1957) was an English physicist and an influential scientific adviser to the British government from the early 1940s to the early '50s, particularly to Winston Churchill. He advocated the "area" bombing of German cities during World War II and doubted the sophistication of Nazi Germany's radar technology and the existence of its "V" weapons programme.
Lindemann was the second of three sons of Adolphus Frederick Lindemann, who had emigrated to the United Kingdom circa 1871 and become naturalised. Frederick was born in Baden-Baden in Germany where his American mother Olga Noble, the widow of a wealthy banker, was taking "the cure".
After schooling in Scotland and Darmstadt, he attended the University of Berlin. He did research in physics at the Sorbonne that confirmed theories, first put forward by Albert Einstein, on specific heats at very low temperatures. For this and other scientific work, Lindemann was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920.
In 1911 he was invited to the Solvay Conference on "Radiation and the Quanta" where he was the youngest attendee.
At the outbreak of World War I, Lindemann was playing tennis in Germany and had to leave in haste to avoid internment. In 1915, he joined the staff of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. He developed a mathematical theory of aircraft spin recovery, and later learned to fly so that he could test his ideas himself. Prior to Lindemann's work, a spinning aircraft was almost invariably unrecoverable and the result to the pilot fatal.
In 1919 Lindemann was appointed professor of experimental philosophy at the University of Oxford and director of the Clarendon Laboratory, largely on the recommendation of Henry Tizard who had been a colleague in Berlin. In 1919, Lindemann was one of the first people to suggest that in the solar wind particles of both polarities, protons as well as electrons, come from the Sun. He was probably not aware that Kristian Birkeland had made the same prediction three years earlier in 1916.