Reiner Kümmel

Reiner KÜMMEL, 2005

Reiner Kümmel (born 9 July 1939 in Fulda) is a German physicist specialised in solid-state physics, thermodynamics and econophysics.

Scientific career

Reiner Kümmel studied physics and mathematics at TH Darmstadt from 1959 to 1964. He received a scholarship from the Cusanuswerk and completed his doctorate on superconductivity at Frankfurt University in 1968, where he also habilitated in theoretical physics in 1973. During his doctorate and habilitation, he also conducted research abroad, such as from 1965 to 1967 as a research assistant under the two-time Nobel Prize winner in physics John Bardeen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1970 to 1972, he worked in Colombia at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, where he helped to set up a master's programme in physics on a DAAD scholarship, which served to develop the next generation of academics. During this time, he focussed on thermodynamics.

In 1974, he took up a professorship for theoretical physics in Würzburg, which was also characterised by numerous research visits abroad. In the 1970s, the time of the first and second oil price shocks, his interest in economics as a second mainstay began to grow. A lively exchange developed with Wolfgang Eichhorn, who worked as an economist (and mathematician) at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Karlsruhe. His research in physics focussed on the theory of inhomogeneous superconductors and mesoscopic heterocontacts. His economic interests focussed on energy use and emission reduction. From 1996 to 1998, Reiner Kümmel chaired the Energy Working Group of the German Physical Society. He retired in October 2004. Nevertheless, he remained associated with the university with a teaching assignment for the lecture Thermodynamics and Economics until the summer semester 2015.

In his book The Second Law of Economics, he discusses the influence of energy conservation and entropy on prosperity and adds to the production theory of economics ‘the important scientific component of energy, without which a modern economy cannot be understood’. He calls for energy taxes to alleviate the pressure to grow.

Publications

• Arne Jacobs, Reiner Kümmel: Dynamics of conversion of supercurrents into normal currents and vice versa. In: Phys. Rev. B, Vol. 64, No. 10, 2001.
• Reiner Kümmel, Robert U. Ayres, Dietmar Lindenberger: Thermodynamic laws, economic methods and the productive power of energy. In: Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2010, pp. 145–179.
• Reiner Kümmel: The Second Law of Economics: Energy, Entropy, and the Origins of Wealth. Springer, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-1-4419-9364-9. 
• Reiner Kümmel, Dietmar Lindenberger: How energy conversion drives economic growth far from the equilibrium of neoclassical economics. In: New Journal of Physics 16, Dec. 2014, 125008.
• Reiner Kümmel, Dietmar Lindenberger, Florian Weiser: The economic power of energy and the need to integrate it with energy policy. In: Energy Policy 86 (2015), 833–843.
• Reiner Kümmel, Dietmar Lindenberger: Energy, Entropy, Constraints, and Creativity in Economic Growth and Crises. In: Entropy. Band 22, Nr. 10, 14. Oktober 2020, ISSN 1099-4300, 1156.