science · 24 November 1998 · 26 years ago
death
Died 24 Nov 1998 at age 90 (born 14 May 1908).
Nicholas Kurti [formerly Miklós Mór Kürti] was a Hungarian-British physicist and chef who researched in ultra-low temperature physics, and in a record-breaking nuclear cooling experiments that came within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero. As a young man, in 1933, he left the Univeristy of Berlin to flee from the Nazis. Most of his life was then spent at Oxford, England. During WWII, he investigated how to separate the isotopes of uranium (which became of interest in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb). He had a side interest in food science, combining his hobby as a chef with a study of the physics and chemistry of cooking, for which he coined the term molecular gastronomy. (With his wife, he edited the first Royal Society cook book: But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society (1988).
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