Suman Seth, Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890–1926. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. vii+378. ISBN 978-0-262-01373-4. £23.95 (hardback) (original) (raw)
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The paper detailed what we now know as his ''exclusion principle.'' This essay situates the work leading up to Pauli's principle within the traditions of the ''Sommerfeld School,'' led by Munich University's renowned theorist and teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Offering a substantial corrective to previous accounts of the birth of quantum mechanics, which have tended to sideline Sommerfeld's work, it is suggested here that both the method and the content of Pauli's paper drew substantially on the work of the Sommerfeld School in the early 1920s. Part One describes Sommerfeld's turn away from a faith in the power of model-based (modellmässig) methods in his early career towards the use of a more phenomenological emphasis on empirical regularities (Gesetzmässigkeiten) during precisely the period that both Pauli and Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), among others, were his students. Part two delineates the importance of Sommerfeld's phenomenology to Pauli's methods in the exclusion principle paper, a paper that also eschewed modellmässig approaches in favour of a stress on Gesetzmässigkeiten. In terms of content, a focus on Sommerfeld's work reveals the roots of Pauli's understanding of the fundamental Zweideutigkeit (ambiguity) involving the quantum number of electrons within the atom. The conclusion points to the significance of these results to an improved historical understanding of the origin of aspects of Heisenberg's 1925 paper on the ''Quantum-theoretical Reformulation (Umdeutung) of Kinematical and Mechanical Relations.''
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Sommerfeld's extension of Bohr's atomic model was motivated by the quest for a theory of the Zeeman and Stark effects. The crucial idea was that a spectral line is made up of coinciding frequencies which are decomposed in an applied field. In October 1914 Johannes Stark had published the results of his experimental investigation on the splitting of spectral lines in hydrogen (Balmer lines) in electric fields, which showed that the frequency of each Balmer line becomes decomposed into a multiplet of frequencies. The number of lines in such a decomposition grows with the index of the line in the Balmer series. Sommerfeld concluded from this observation that the quantization in Bohr's model had to be altered in order to allow for such decompositions. He outlined this idea in a lecture in winter 1914/15, but did not publish it. The First World War further delayed its elaboration. When Bohr published new results in autumn 1915, Sommerfeld finally developed his theory in a provisional form in two memoirs which he presented in December 1915 and January 1916 to the Bavarian Academy of Science. In July 1916 he published the refined version in the Annalen der Physik. The focus here is on the preliminary Academy memoirs whose rudimentary form is better suited for a historical approach to Sommerfeld's atomic theory than the finished Annalen-paper. This introductory essay reconstructs the historical context (mainly based on Sommerfeld's correspondence). It will become clear that the extension of Bohr's model did not emerge in a singular stroke of genius but resulted from an evolving process.
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In the early 1890s, before his well-known experiments on cathode rays, J.J. Thomson outlined a discrete model of electromagnetic radiation. In the same years, Larmor was trying to match continuous with discrete models for matter and electricity. Just starting from Faraday"s tubes of force, J.J. Thomson put forward a reinterpretation of the electromagnetic field: energy, placed both in the tubes of force and in the motion of tubes of force, spread and propagated by discrete units, in accordance with a theoretical model quite different from Maxwell and Heaviside"s.
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The Springer book series History of Physics publishes scholarly yet widely accessible books on all aspects of the history of physics. These cover the history and evolution of ideas and techniques, pioneers and their contributions, institutional history, as well as the interactions between physics research and society. Also included in the scope of the series are key historical works that are published or translated for the first time, or republished with annotation and analysis. As a whole, the series helps to demonstrate the key role of physics in shaping the modern world, as well as revealing the often meandering path that led to our current understanding of physics and the cosmos. It upholds the notion expressed by Gerald Holton that "science should treasure its history, that historical scholarship should treasure science, and that the full understanding of each is deficient without the other." The series welcomes equally works by historians of science and contributions from practicing physicists. These books are aimed primarily at researchers and students in the sciences, history of science, and science studies; but they also provide stimulating reading for philosophers, sociologists and a broader public eager to discover how physics research-and the laws of physics themselves-came to be what they are today. All publications in the series are peer reviewed. Titles are published as both printand eBooks.