Australian physicist who studied cosmic rays but considered his most important contribution to be an economic theory that explain how entropy causes unemployment.
In 1939 Rathgeber emigrated to Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children. From 1940 to 1946 he worked as a part-time as a research physicist with the Optical Munitions Panel at the University of Melbourne. In 1940 he obtained the Thomas Lyle fellowship in physics at the University of Melbourne. In 1952 he shared the David Syme Research Prize and was asked by Harry Messel to take up a position as a reader at the University of Sydney.
During the inter-war period, Rathgeber was heavily influenced by the economic ideas of Silvio Gesell which were popular in Germany at the time. Rathgeber retired in 1973 and in retirement returned to his earlier interest in economics and its connection with physics and in particular entropy and control system design. In 1974 he developed a theory explaining how random noise in the form of an error rate, as defined in Claude Shannon’s information theory causes an inverse linear relationship between unemployment and inflation, but at the time such ideas were not taken seriously. Rathgeber continued to write various unpublished papers about his theory. He died in Sydney on 20 June 1995, aged 87.
Link to Wikipedia biography