Surely the coat makes you feel warmer by preventing heat loss by (mostly) convection? Your body core temperature is not warmer than it was before you put the coat on, you just feel warmer. I cannot find any reference to cooler radiation actually being absorbed by a warmer surface *for net energy gain* as that would appear to invalidate the @nd Law of Thermodynamics. Do you have such a reference? Thanks for replying.
Professor Robert Maurer, an experimental solid state physicist with a strong background in chemistry, died at his retirement home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 2, 1995. He was born in Rochester, New York into a family of Alsatian origin on March 26, 1913 and had all of his formal education there. George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, had given a large amount of money to the University of Rochester, permitting it to develop a new campus and promote graduate education; it was easy and natural for Maurer to enroll there. He decided initially to major in chemistry and obtained his undergraduate degree in that subject in 1934, obtaining a substantial base in physical chemistry. When he learned, however, that Lee A. DuBridge had been appointed head of the physics department and would encourage research in solid state physics, he switched goals and decided to obtain a PhD in that field. He was in fact one of DuBridge's last students, obtaining his degree in 1939, just prior to the outbreak of World War II when DuBidge went off to head the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His thesis dealt with the photoelectric properties of sodium and barium. One of his close associates as a graduate student was LeRoy Apker, after whom one of the prominent physics prizes is named. The two shared many interests in common and joined frequently in typical graduate student pranks.
Graduate school was followed by two years of post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Arthur von Hippel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, among other things, he focused on problems related to dielectric breakdown in glasses.
With the growing involvement of the United States in the conflict which developed into World War II, Maurer joined a group in the physics department of the University of Pennsylvania which was seeking, under the sponsorship of the Radiation Laboratory of MIT, to improve the performance of silicon diode rectifiers which were badly needed as heterodyne mixers in microwave radar. Two years later he accepted a tenure track appointment in the physics department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and began what became a lifetime academic career as a combination of teacher and head of a research laboratory. Initially, his research in Pittsburgh centered about a program proposed by the U. S. Navy, carried out in close cooperation with Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann, who had come to Pittsburgh as refugees from Germany. The goal of the program was to develop what came to be called a dark trace screen for viewing the return images of radar. The normal images produced by fluorescent screens, which are highly effective in a somewhat darkened room, are difficult to see on the bridge of a ship in bright daylight. Most of the research focused on the use of evaporated layers of potassium chloride, the electron beam producing a spectrum of color-center darkening which closely matches the eye sensitivity curve for vision. Although the ideal dark trace screen was not found, the experience prepared Maurer for much additional research on defect phenomena in alkali halide crystals.
On request, Maurer spent a year and a half, until the end of the war, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago where the large plutonium-producing reactors that were being constructed at Hanford Washington had been designed. He joined a mixed group of chemists and physicists trying to understand what effects the high level of radiation flux in the reactors might have on the properties of components-a problem posed by Eugene Wigner. In this connection, he carried