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Constructing Quantum Mechanics Volume One The Scaffold 1900 1923 1St Edition Anthony Duncan Full Chapter
Constructing Quantum Mechanics Volume One The Scaffold 1900 1923 1St Edition Anthony Duncan Full Chapter
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Preface
How did physicists in the first three decades of the last century come to recognize that
they needed a new framework to account for a growing list of phenomena that they could
not account for with what we now call classical physics? That is the central question
of this book. To answer it, we analyze what we have identified as the main strands in
the development of this new framework. This first volume takes us from the late 1890s
to the early 1920s. The second volume will take us from the early to the late 1920s.
Our starting point can be compared to that of someone first encountering an arch. This
person will wonder how it was built and come to realize that it was done with the help of
a scaffold. If we think of quantum mechanics as an arch, we can likewise say that it was
put together with the help of a scaffold, provided in this case by elements of the theory
it replaced. By using the arch-and-scaffold metaphor in their subtitles, we acknowledge
the backwards-looking perspective we are adopting in these volumes.1 Decisions about
which strands in the development of quantum mechanics we cover in detail and which
ones we treat more cursorily (if at all) were informed by our assessment, in hindsight,
of their relative importance for the scaffold on which the arch was erected. However,
our analysis of the strands selected for detailed discussion is given entirely in terms of
insights and concepts available to the historical actors at the time. To find meaningful
historically sensitive answers to our central question, we scrupulously adhered to this
methodological principle.
The authors of two previous histories of quantum physics, Max Jammer (1966) and
Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg (1982a,b,c,d, 1987, 2000–2001), addressed
questions similar to ours and faced similar historiographical challenges. Our book,
however, is not only more explicit about the approach taken but differs from these earlier
efforts in several other respects. A reader familiar with these older histories will notice
the most important differences just leafing through the pages of this book and glancing
at its table of contents.
First of all, our choice of topics is more selective than either Jammer’s or Mehra
and Rechenberg’s. Without being selective, we would have had no hope of covering the
developments we cover at the level of detail we cover them in just two volumes. It took
Mehra and Rechenberg, depending on how one counts, six or nine volumes to cover
roughly the same period and Jammer only managed to do so in one volume by omitting
the derivation of most results.
1 The arch-and-scaffold metaphor for the development of scientific theories is presented and the historio-
graphical issues it raises are discussed in Janssen (2019). The metaphor was inspired by Alexander Graham
Cairns-Smith (1985, pp. 58–60), who used it to illustrate his suggestion that the complex nucleotides of RNA
and DNA were first assembled on minute clay crystals.
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vi Preface
2 For English translations and commentary, see Sommerfeld (2014a, 2014b) and Eckert (2014).
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Preface vii
work covered in Part One of this volume than on the developments covered in Part Two,
where, in some places, we worked almost exclusively from primary sources.
Research for this book was done in the context of a large international project in the
history and foundations of quantum physics that ran from 2006 to 2013. This project
was a joint initiative of Jürgen Renn’s department at the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science and the theory department of the Fritz Haber Institute, both located
in Berlin. The project led to the establishment of a series of conferences on the history of
quantum physics. After a small workshop in Berlin in the Summer of 2006 (HQ0), four
such conferences have been held so far: HQ1 (Berlin, July 2–6, 2007), HQ2 (Utrecht,
July 14–17, 2008), HQ3 (Berlin, June 28–July 2, 2010), and HQ4 (San Sebastián, July
15–18, 2015). We were involved with this Berlin quantum project from the beginning and
presented our work both at the original workshop and at all four subsequent conferences.
These presentations resulted in four papers, all on topics that will be covered in the
second volume of our book (Duncan and Janssen 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013).
A pair of papers on a topic covered in this volume grew out of the presentation we
gave at a conference to commemorate the centenary of the Bohr atom, held June 11–14,
2013 in Copenhagen and attended by many members of the Berlin quantum project.
These two papers are on the explanation of the Stark effect, the splitting of spectral
lines in electric fields, both in the old and in the new quantum theory (Duncan and
Janssen 2014, 2015). One of us co-authored a paper on Ehrenfest’s adiabatic principle
with another member of this large international collaboration, the Barcelona historian
of physics Enric Pérez (Duncan and Pérez 2016). These papers formed the basis for
parts of Sections 5.2 and 6.3 in this volume. We are grateful to Elsevier, publisher of
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, and the Royal Danish Academy of
Sciences and Letters, publisher of the proceedings of the Bohr centenary conference, for
permission to use this material.
As indicated above, we wrote this book with the idea that it could be used for
courses in the history of modern physics aimed at undergraduate majors in physics or
beginning graduate students in the history and philosophy of science. We both have
experience teaching such courses. The past couple of years, one of us (MJ) has been
using drafts of chapters of this book to teach the history of quantum physics to an
audience of predominantly physics juniors and seniors at the University of Minnesota.
We are grateful to the students in these classes for their feedback.
Several sections in Part One of this volume were written with the express purpose
in mind of having students read them in tandem with some of the classic papers by
Planck (1900d, 1901a), Einstein (1905a, 1907, 1909b, 1916b) (all available in English
translation), and Bohr (1913b, 1913c, 1913d). Part Two likewise prepares the student
for reading many of the original papers of the old quantum theory (though many of these
have not been translated) as well as the four editions of the “bible of the old quantum
theory,” Atombau und Spektrallinien (Sommerfeld 1919, 1921, 1922a, 1924). An English
translation (Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines) of the third edition appeared shortly after
the German version was published (Sommerfeld 1923).
To encourage and support faculty in physics departments interested in offering a class
on the history of quantum mechanics based on the latest scholarship in the field, we
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viii Preface
partnered with the Center for History of Physics and the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, both at the American Institute of Physics in College
Park, MD, to set up a website that will make supplementary materials for a course
based on our book available to students and instructors. This will include electronic
versions of the primary sources mentioned above, materials from the course offered at
the University of Minnesota, and selected images from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
Oxford University Press has set up a companion website featuring a series of “web
resources” with more detailed treatments of various topics covered in the book. The
URL for this companion website is: www.oup.com/companion/constructingquantum.
The present volume has two appendices with crucial background material on clas-
sical mechanics and spectroscopy. The additional information provided in our “web
resources” is not critical for understanding the main text of this volume. To give two
examples: one of these web resources is on classical dispersion theory and includes the
derivation of a key result Planck needed to derive a formula for the spectral distribution
of black-body radiation (see Eq. (2.7) in Section 2.3); another is on Woldemar Voigt’s
classical theory of the Zeeman effect, which played an important role in attempts to
account for the effect in the old quantum theory (see Section 7.2.2).
We are grateful to Gregory Good, Director of the Center for History of Physics, for
agreeing to partner with us in developing and maintaining this website in support of
our book, and to Sonke Adlung, our editor at Oxford University Press, for agreeing
to have the American Institute of Physics host a website connected to a book in their
catalog. The materials from the course on history of modern physics at the University
of Minnesota were developed as part of the project “Digital Essays in the History of
Quantum Mechanics” led by Robert Rynasiewicz of Johns Hopkins University and
supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant No. SES-1027018.
It remains for us to thank a number of individuals and organizations that made our
work possible. Our main debt of gratitude is to the Berlin quantum project. We wrote
parts of this volume as guests in Jürgen Renn’s department at the Max Planck Institute
for History of Science and we thank the institute for its support. One of us (MJ) has
been a regular visitor at the institute since its inception in the early 1990s and focused on
this book project in the Spring of 2016 during the second half of a sabbatical from the
University of Minnesota. This work in Berlin was supported by a Research Award from
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The recipient (MJ) would like to express his
gratitude to the foundation for its support. For arranging our stays in Berlin, we thank
Shadiye Leather-Barrow.
Most of the book was written in Pittsburgh where we have been getting together
regularly to work on the history of quantum physics. We started the actual writing
of this book in the Fall of 2015 when one of us (MJ) spent the first half of the
aforementioned sabbatical at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of
Pittsburgh. We thank the staff at the Center, especially its director John Norton, for its
hospitality and support. The company of Edith Cohen, Donna Naples, Ted Newman,
Max Niedermaier, and Merrilee Salmon has made our get-togethers in Pittsburgh all the
more enjoyable.
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Preface ix
Contents
List of plates xv
xii Contents
2.4 From the Wien law to the Planck law: changing the expression for
the entropy of a resonator 65
2.5 Justifying the new expression for the entropy of a resonator 71
2.6 Energy parcels or energy bins? 77
3 Einstein, Equipartition, Fluctuations, and Quanta 84
3.1 Einstein’s annus mirabilis 84
3.2 The statistical trilogy (1902–1904) 86
3.3 The light-quantum paper (1905) 94
3.3.1 Classical theory leads to the Rayleigh–Jeans law 94
3.3.2 Einstein’s argument for light quanta: fluctuations in black-body
radiation at high frequencies 96
3.3.3 Evidence for light quanta: the photoelectric effect 103
3.4 Black-body radiation and the necessity of quantization 107
3.4.1 The quantization of Planck’s resonators 107
3.4.2 Lorentz’s 1908 Rome lecture: Planck versus Rayleigh–Jeans 112
3.4.3 Einstein’s 1909 Salzburg lecture: fluctuations and
wave–particle duality 117
3.5 The breakdown of equipartition and the specific heat of solids at low
temperatures (1907–1911) 127
3.6 Einstein’s quantum theory of radiation (1916) 133
3.6.1 New derivation of the Planck law 134
3.6.2 Momentum fluctuations and the directed nature of radiation 138
4 The Birth of the Bohr Model 143
4.1 Introduction 143
4.2 The dissertation: recognition of problems of classical theory 145
4.3 The Rutherford Memorandum: atomic models and quantum theory 148
4.3.1 Prelude: classical atomic models (Thomson, Nagaoka, Schott) 149
4.3.2 Scattering of α particles and Rutherford’s nuclear atom 152
4.3.3 Bohr’s first encounter with Rutherford’s nuclear atom: energy loss
of α particles traveling through matter 155
4.3.4 Interlude: Planck’s constant enters atomic modeling
(Haas, Nicholson) 157
4.3.5 Planck’s constant enters Bohr’s atomic modeling 165
4.4 From the Rutherford Memorandum to the Trilogy 171
4.4.1 Bohr comparing his results to Nicholson’s 171
4.4.2 Enter the Balmer formula 175
4.5 The Trilogy: quantum atomic models and spectra 178
4.5.1 Part One: the hydrogen atom 179
4.5.2 Parts Two and Three: multi-electron atoms and
multi-atom molecules 185
4.6 Early evidence for the Bohr model: spectral lines in hydrogen and helium 196
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Contents xiii
Appendices
A Classical Mechanics 385
A.1 The physicist’s mechanical toolbox (ca 1915) 387
A.1.1 Newtonian mechanics 387
A.1.2 Lagrangian mechanics 389
A.1.3 Hamiltonian mechanics 393
A.1.4 The adiabatic principle 402
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xiv Contents
Bibliography 449
Index 481
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List of plates
Plate 20 Max Laue (far left), Paul Sophus Epstein Plate 21 Karl Schwarzschild.
(to his left), Paul Ewald (far right), and other members
of Sommerfeld’s group in Munich in 1912.
1
Introduction to Volume One
1.1 Overview
This is the first of two projected volumes on the genesis of quantum mechanics, covering
developments from Max Planck’s work on black-body radiation around the turn of the
twentieth century to John von Neumann’s introduction of the Hilbert-space formalism
of modern quantum mechanics in 1927. This first volume deals with developments up
to the early 1920s. It is divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters.
In the chapters comprising Part One, we take a broadly biographical approach, tracing
the earliest stages of the development of quantum theory through the contributions of
three main protagonists, Max Planck (Chapter 2), Albert Einstein (Chapter 3), and Niels
Bohr (Chapter 4).1 The focus in this early period was on black-body radiation and—
starting around 1910 when Walther Nernst provided experimental support for a theory
proposed by Einstein in 1907—the specific heat of solids at low temperatures. These
were the topics dominating the discussion at the first Solvay Conference in Brussels in
1911 (see Plate 9), which was devoted to the fledgling quantum theory.
Part One ends with Bohr’s derivation of the Balmer formula for the spectrum of
hydrogen from a model of hydrogen and hydrogen-like atoms in the first part of his
famous 1913 trilogy. This model is a precarious combination of elements from classical
mechanics and electrodynamics and elements from quantum theory. Bohr’s success
with hydrogen led to a shift in focus in work on quantum theory to atomic structure
and spectroscopy. His model became the germ for what has come to be known as the
old quantum theory, which a little over a decade later was transmogrified into modern
quantum mechanics. This transition will be covered in Volume Two of our book.
Part Two of this volume deals with the old quantum theory. As in Bohr’s model,
atoms are treated as miniature solar systems in this theory, which made the analysis
of atomic structure amenable, as the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (see Plate 21)
first realized in 1916, to sophisticated techniques imported from celestial mechanics.
The undisputed leader during this period, besides Bohr, was Arnold Sommerfeld
1 See Plates 4, 8, and 15 in the section between Parts One and Two for photographs of Planck, Einstein, and
Bohr, respectively.
Constructing Quantum Mechanics. Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845478.001.0001
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(see Plate 15), the author of Atombau und Spektrallinien (Atomic Structure and Spec-
tral lines), which became known as the bible of the old quantum theory and went
through four ever-expanding editions between 1919 and 1924 (Eckert 2013c; Seth
2010). Despite Sommerfeld’s central role, however, the biographical approach of Part
One is ill-suited to deal with the complexities of the old quantum theory, its various
refinements, and the confrontation with a wealth of new data, in optical as well as in
X-ray spectroscopy, and including the complicated patterns observed in the splitting of
spectral lines by electric and magnetic fields, both internal and external to the atoms.
The old quantum theory itself will therefore take center stage in the three chapters
comprising Part Two. In Chapter 5, we cover the principles the theory was based on, the
quantization conditions in their various guises as well as Bohr’s correspondence principle
and the adiabatic principle of Paul Ehrenfest (see Plate 8). In Chapters 6 and 7, we
cover the most important examples of the interplay between theory and experiment.
Chapter 6 is devoted to what were seen at the time as important successes of the theory,
even though several practitioners realized that some of these successes were incomplete.
In hindsight, moreover, other successes turned out to be largely accidental. With these
qualifications, the most important of these successes were the theory’s agreement with the
measurements by Friedrich Paschen (see Plate 2) of the relativistic fine structure in the
spectra of hydrogen and helium, with the systematic examination by Henry Moseley (see
Plate 22) of the X-ray spectra of the elements in the periodic table, and with the data of
Johannes Stark (see Plate 10) on the effect named after him, the splitting of spectral lines
by external electric fields, in hydrogen and helium (Duncan and Janssen 2014, 2015). In
Chapter 7, we turn to what at the time were acknowledged failures of the theory, notably
that it could not explain the Zeeman effect, the magnetic counterpart of the Stark effect,
or the intricate multiplets in spectra of atoms more complex than hydrogen and that it
gave the wrong value for the binding energy of helium. Like the successes, not all failures
were complete failures. In the case of the Zeeman effect, for instance, Sommerfeld and
others found empirical rules accounting for the line splittings observed under various
conditions in impressive quantitative detail. That the Zeeman effect was nonetheless seen
as a failure of the old quantum theory was because no consistent mechanical model could
be found that captured these empirical regularities.
In the balance of this introduction we give an overview, as nontechnical as possible,
of the contents of Volume One, identifying key players and their main contributions
and highlighting points we think are new or not given the emphasis they deserve in the
existing literature on the history of quantum theory.
challenge of finding this function. Initially, however, his primary objective was not to
find the black-body radiation law but to provide an electromagnetic foundation for the
second law of thermodynamics. Although Ludwig Boltzmann and James Clerk Maxwell
had argued decades earlier that the second law only has statistical validity, Planck still
believed it to hold strictly, admitting no exceptions, no matter how improbable.
Planck thought he had identified a conservative time-asymmetric microscopic process
in electromagnetism from which he could derive macroscopic irreversibility: a plane wave
that is absorbed by a charged harmonic oscillator (or resonator as he called it) and then
reemitted as a concentric wave. The inverse of this process is never observed in nature.
As Boltzmann pointed out to him, however, this is just because the initial conditions
for the inverse process are never realized. Maxwell’s equations, Boltzmann reminded
Planck, are time-symmetric, just as Newton’s laws, and hence cannot serve as the basis
for a derivation of the second law. Planck thereupon introduced the assumption of what
he called “natural radiation” to rule out initial conditions that would lead to violations of
the second law. Using this assumption, he could show that the total entropy of the system,
the sum of the entropy of the resonators and the entropy of the radiation, never decreases.
In this system, however, the entropy increases without changing the spectral distribution
of the energy. As Ehrenfest, who first drew attention to this problem, put it: “radiation
may over time become arbitrarily disordered—it certainly will not get any blacker” (1906,
p. 529; quoted in Klein 1970a, p. 238). The problem was that the radiation’s interaction
with the oscillators is such that it cannot transfer energy from one frequency to another.
To reach the equilibrium distribution, the system must be in contact with some other
body, a “speck of soot” [Kohlenstäubchen] as Planck (1906a, p. 66) suggested later or
the walls of the cavity, which will act as a heat bath kept at some fixed temperature.
This aspect of the second law, the approach to equilibrium normally associated with the
increase in entropy, could thus not be derived in Planck’s approach but simply had to be
assumed.
Planck’s approach, however, did provide a way to find the black-body radiation law.
The key result he needed for this was a relation between the average energy of an
oscillator with a certain resonance frequency and the energy density of the radiation at
that same frequency. With this relation and some basic thermodynamics, the choice of an
expression for the entropy of one of Planck’s oscillators as a function of its average energy
translates directly into a specific black-body radiation law. In this way, Planck (1900a)
recovered a law gleaned from experimental data by Paschen (1896–1897) and proposed
independently by Wilhelm Wien (1896) (see Plate 1) on the basis of a superficial analogy
with the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. Planck convinced himself that the expression
for the oscillator entropy leading to the Wien law (or Paschen–Wien law as it was
sometimes called in those days) was the only one compatible with the second law of
thermodynamics.
Right around that time, however, Otto Lummer, Ernst Pringsheim, Heinrich Rubens
(see Plate 3), and Ferdinand Kurlbaum, experimentalists at the Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt, the German bureau of standards, began to find deviations from the Wien
law (Kangro 1976). Reexamining his derivation of the Wien law, Planck realized that the
second law does not uniquely determine the expression for the oscillator entropy after
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all. He used the leeway the second law still afforded him to change the expression to
one giving a black-body radiation law that merges with the Wien law at high frequencies
and merges with a law proposed by Lord Rayleigh (1900b) at low frequencies. Planck’s
experimental colleagues quickly established that this new law fit the data remarkably well
at all frequencies. Planck had found Kirchhoff’s universal function, the Planck law of
black-body radiation.
[T]he spectroscope tells us that some molecules can execute a great many different
kinds of vibrations. They must therefore be systems of very considerable degree of
complexity, having far more than six variables [i.e., degrees of freedom] . . . Every
additional variable . . . increases the specific heat . . . I have now put before you what I
consider to be the greatest difficulty yet encountered by the molecular theory (Maxwell
1875, p. 433).
The difficulty persisted unabated at the beginning of the twentieth century. “What
would appear to be wanted,” Lord Rayleigh reflected in 1900, “is some escape from
the destructive simplicity of the general conclusion relating to the partition of kinetic
energy” (1900a, p. 451). The “Maxwell–Boltzmann doctrine regarding the partition of
energy” is the second of two “Nineteenth century clouds over the dynamical theory of
heat and light” identified by Lord Kelvin (1901, p. 492). Cloud No. I, “the relative motion
of ether and ponderable bodies,” only takes up 6 pages in the printed version of Kelvin’s
famous address, Cloud No. II the remaining 35! We tend to think of equipartition as
part of what we now call classical physics but it was certainly not part of what was
considered well-established physics at the time. Although we will freely use the term
‘classical physics’ to contrast it with quantum (and relativity) physics, the controversial
status of the equipartition theorem serves as a stark reminder that the old physics of the
nineteenth century only came to be called ‘classical’ with the rise of the new physics of
the twentieth (Staley 2005, 2008).
Einstein’s light-quantum paper made it clear that blocking the application of equipar-
tition to radiation was not enough to evade the problems that result from the interaction
of discrete matter with continuous radiation. To bring out the problem, one only had to
apply equipartition to the oscillators interacting with the radiation introduced by Planck.
Surely, contemporary theory sanctioned this application! Appealing to equipartition to
set the average energy of an oscillator equal to kT and using the relation Planck had
derived to find the corresponding expression for the energy density of the radiation at this
oscillator’s resonance frequency, Einstein arrived at what is now known as the Rayleigh–
Jeans law for black-body radiation. Rayleigh (1900b) had found this law in 1900 by
applying equipartition directly to the degrees of freedom of the radiation (it is called
the Rayleigh–Jeans law because James Jeans (1905a, 1905b) corrected a numerical error
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in Rayleigh’s derivation). Rayleigh only expected his law to hold for the “graver modes”
(lower frequencies) of the radiation and had, rather arbitrarily, inserted a damping factor
to ensure that the energy density decreases exponentially as the frequency increases.
Without such a factor, the energy density increases without bound as we move to higher
frequencies. This is what Ehrenfest, who had clearly recognized the problem by 1905,
later called “the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe in the ultraviolet” (Ehrenfest 1911, p. 92,
quoted in Klein 1970a, p. 249). The problem, Einstein suggested, could be avoided by
adopting the hypothesis that light “consists of a finite number of energy quanta localized
at points in space that move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as
complete units” (Einstein 1905a, p. 178).
Wien regime that Einstein was considering if we take light quanta to be quantized modes
of standing waves in the cavity containing the radiation. Rayleigh and Jeans arrived at
the law named after them by counting modes of such standing waves. Ehrenfest (1906)
indicated and Peter Debye (1910) (see Plate 11) showed in detail how quantizing the
energy in these modes leads to the Planck law. Although none of these authors explicitly
mentioned this, these standing-wave modes are not localized. Hence, in hindsight, the
evidence for the localization of light quanta in Einstein’s 1905 paper does not come from
the fluctuation argument but from the explanation of the photoelectric effect, the ejection
of electrons from a metal plate by radiation of sufficiently high frequency. Somehow the
energy of a light quantum gets concentrated at the position of the electron knocked out
of the metal plate. It can thus be seen as a form of poetic justice that the light-quantum
paper is still widely known as the photoelectric-effect paper and that Einstein won the
Nobel prize for his explanation of this effect.
In his first talk at a major physics conference, the 1909 Naturforscherversammlung,
the annual meeting of the Society of German Physicists and Physicians held that year
in Salzburg (cf. Chapter 2, note 20), Einstein (1909b) once again used fluctuations in
black-body radiation to argue that light sometimes behaves as a particle and sometimes
as a wave. Using the fluctuation formula he had found in 1904 but now deriving it
from Boltzmann’s principle rather than the canonical ensemble and using the Planck
law rather than the Wien law, he showed that the mean square fluctuation of both energy
and momentum in a given volume of black-body radiation in narrow frequency range
is given by the sum of two terms, one of the form one would expect for particles, the
other of the form one would expect for waves (Klein 1964). Neither the 1905 nor
the 1909 fluctuation argument convinced the physics community that, under certain
circumstances, light behaves as a collection of particles.
In the 1905 light-quantum paper, Einstein, though borrowing elements from Planck’s
work, had employed the Wien law for black-body radiation rather than the full Planck
law. It was only the following year that he addressed the relation between his light-
quantum hypothesis and Planck’s work. In two papers written that year, Einstein (1906b,
1907) showed that Planck’s derivation of his radiation law only works if the energy of his
oscillators is actually quantized and not merely discretized for counting purposes. If the
energy of an oscillator can take on the full continuum of values, he showed, one arrives
at the equipartition value for its average energy, which, as he had shown in 1905, leads
directly to the disastrous Rayleigh–Jeans law. If, however, the energy of the oscillator can
only take on the values nhν, one arrives at the expression for its average energy that
leads to the Planck law. Einstein overstated his case, claiming that Planck’s derivation
of his black-body radiation law implicitly relied on his own light-quantum hypothesis,
but he did show incontrovertibly that it relied on the quantization of the energy of the
oscillators.
1907), albeit via a different route (Kuhn 1987, pp. 196–202). In an influential lecture he
gave that year in Rome, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1908a, 1909b) (see Plate 5) argued
that the electron theory, Lorentz’s version of Maxwellian electrodynamics in which
electromagnetic fields interact with tiny charge-carrying particles, leads inescapably
to the Rayleigh–Jeans law (Kox 2013a). The derivation involved the application of
equipartition to the degrees of freedom of the field. Lorentz had come to agree with
Jeans that this application was warranted even though it meant that matter and radiation
can never be in thermal equilibrium. Following Jeans, he assumed that thermalization was
an extremely slow process, which would explain why we never observe matter having lost
all its energy to radiation. Lorentz explicitly admitted that, on this view, it was ultimately
just a coincidence that all results derived for black-body radiation on the assumption
of thermal equilibrium (such as the Stefan–Boltzmann law and the Wien displacement
law) happen to agree with all our observations. He also conceded that the available data
on black-body radiation clearly supported the Planck law rather than the Rayleigh–Jeans
law, but, like Einstein, he recognized that Planck’s law could only be had at the expense
of profound changes in the theory of electrodynamics. In conclusion, he called for more
experiments to decide between the Planck law and the Rayleigh–Jeans law.
Responding to Lorentz’s appeal to the experimentalists, two of them, Lummer and
Pringsheim (1908), observed that, if the Rayleigh–Jeans law were correct, a metal plate
at room temperature would glow in the dark. Lorentz quickly and independently came
to that same realization (Lorentz 2008, Doc. 171). And when taken to task by Wien
about his Rome lecture, he accepted that the Rayleigh–Jeans law had become untenable.
Lorentz was now prepared to start thinking about the consequences of accepting the
Planck law. What he found particularly hard to swallow was that a charged oscillator
could not emit or absorb an amount of energy less than h times its resonance frequency.
In a letter to Lorentz in reply to this objection in the Fall of 1908, Planck for the first time
stated unambiguously that the energy of an oscillator of resonance frequency ν can only
take on the discrete values nhν (Lorentz 2008, Doc. 176). In another letter to Lorentz
a little over a year later (Lorentz 2008, Doc. 197), Planck replaced the term ‘resonator’,
which he had been using up to that point but which seemed ill-chosen in view of Lorentz’s
objection, by the term ‘oscillator’, which we have been using all along.
By the end of 1908, senior physicists such as Planck, Lorentz, and Wien had thus
come to accept two points that Einstein (1906b, 1907) and two other members of a
younger generation, Jeans (1905a, 1905b, 1905c) and Ehrenfest (1905, 1906), had been
emphasizing for some time. First, the old physics inevitably leads to the Rayleigh–Jeans
law. Second, the Planck law, amply confirmed experimentally, calls for radical changes
in the old physics.
comments quoted in Section 1.2.3 illustrate, the equipartition theorem was notorious
for giving the wrong values for specific heats of both gases and solids. Thus it was
only natural for Einstein to use the quantized oscillators of Planck’s theory of black-
body radiation, with average energies sharply deviating from their equipartition values,
to construct a simple model of a solid and check its prediction for the specific heat. The
key parameter in Einstein’s theory is the ratio hν/kT. An oscillatory degree of freedom
at frequency ν does not contribute appreciably to the specific heat as long as this ratio
is much greater than unity. This explained why the specific heat of solids decreases with
decreasing temperature, as had been found, for instance, by Heinrich Weber (1872,
1875), one of Einstein’s teachers in Zurich. It also provided the solution to Maxwell’s
puzzle of why the high frequencies of the oscillations presumed to be responsible for
the emission of light do not contribute to the specific heat of gases, not even at room
temperature.
Einstein’s theory drew the attention of low-temperature physicist Nernst, the director
of the Physikalisch-Chemisches Institut in Berlin (Barkan 1999). Exploiting the vast
improvements in cryogenics since the days of Weber, who early on had still used
snow as his coolant, Nernst (1911a, 1911b, 1911c) and his collaborators produced
striking qualitative confirmation of Einstein’s theory (Stone 2013, Chs. 13 and 17). The
importance of this work can be gleaned from the following statement by Sommerfeld,
made at the Naturforscherversammlung in Karlsruhe in September 1911:
It will always remain a glorious chapter in the history of the first decade of the
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt that it has erected one pillar of the quantum theory,
the experimental foundations of cavity [black-body] radiation. Perhaps just as much
credit deserves to be given to Nernst’s institute, which has provided us with the other
pillar of the quantum theory, bearing no less weight, with its systematic measurement of
specific heats (Sommerfeld 1911a, p. 1060; quoted in Staley 2008, p. 406).
Black-body radiation and the specific heat of solids were the two central themes of the
first Solvay conference held in Brussels in late October and early November 1911. This
conference brought nascent quantum theory to the attention of a larger subset of the
scientific community (Barkan 1993). Nernst had been instrumental in convincing the
industrialist Ernest Solvay to finance the conference and to devote it to quantum theory.
The conference, which was by invitation only, was attended by most of the major players
we encountered above. In the famous group picture taken at the conference (see Plate
9), we see senior figures such as Wien, Planck, Rubens, Lorentz, and Nernst, but also
junior ones such as Einstein and Jeans (the most important person missing was Ehrenfest,
working in relative isolation in St. Petersburg at the time). In addition, we see physicists
who would play an important role in the development of quantum theory in the years
to come, such as Ernest Rutherford (Chapter 4) and Sommerfeld (Part Two). Against
the wall behind the participants we see a blackboard with the Planck law for black-body
radiation and a large sheet with a graph showing the rapid decrease of specific heat as
the temperature goes to zero.
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In July 1912, Bohr had given Rutherford a set of notes he had prepared for him on
atomic structure. This so-called Rutherford or Manchester memorandum (Bohr 1912)
records Bohr’s first attempts to construct models for atoms and molecules featuring a
quantum condition inspired by Planck. The memorandum contains detailed calculations
for simple models of the hydrogen atom, the hydrogen molecule, the helium atom, and a
hypothetical helium molecule. All four of these models consist of a single ring of radius
a, rotating with frequency ν, containing one, two, or four electrons. In the case of the
hydrogen and helium atoms, the ring is stabilized by a positively charged nucleus at its
center (Bohr was concerned only with mechanical not with radiative stability). In the case
of the hydrogen and helium molecules, the ring is stabilized by two positively charged
nuclei on either side, placed symmetrically on either side of the plane of the ring, on a
line perpendicular to it and going through its center. The conditions for stability gave
Bohr a relation between the radius a and the frequency ν of his electron rings but he
needed an additional condition to determine the values of a and ν separately and fix the
sizes and frequencies of his electron rings.
To achieve this, Bohr adopted the special hypothesis that the kinetic energy E kin of an
electron in one of his rings is proportional to its frequency ν. In line with the conclusions
he had reached in his dissertation, he emphasized that this hypothesis cannot be derived
from classical physics. The only argument he offered in support of it was that Planck and
Einstein had successfully used a similar hypothesis to account for various experimental
results. He did not elaborate but from his dissertation we know that Bohr had kept abreast
of the relevant literature. Contrary to what one might have expected, however, he did not
set the proportionality constant K between E kin and ν equal to Planck’s constant h. He
used a value of about 0.6h instead.
The Rutherford memorandum does not tell us how Bohr arrived at this value but his
reasoning can convincingly be reconstructed (Rosenfeld 1963, p. xxxi). Bohr used the
equation E kin = Kν to eliminate the ring radius a from the relation between a and ν given
by the stability conditions. That gave him an expression for K in terms of ν and various
constants. He now set the frequency of the electron ring in his model for the hydrogen
molecule equal to the resonance frequency he had used in his paper on the energy loss of
α-particles traveling through a hydrogen gas. On the Helmholtz–Lorentz–Drude theory
of dispersion, this resonance frequency should be equal to the rotation frequency of the
two electrons in the model of the hydrogen molecule in the Rutherford memorandum.
This line of reasoning led him to set K ≈ 0.6h.
The Rutherford memorandum contains a list of phenomena Bohr thought he could
explain with his models. These are primarily chemical phenomena. Spectral lines are not
on the list. The only application for which Bohr provided explicit calculations is the heat
of formation of gases. Using his models to calculate the energy of two hydrogen atoms
and the energy of one hydrogen molecule, he found a value for the heat of formation
of hydrogen gas in the same ballpark as the measured heat of formation of water from
hydrogen and oxygen. He also found that the energy of a helium molecule is greater than
twice the energy of a helium atom, thus explaining why two helium atoms do not form a
helium molecule.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
3 In Germany this became the core of the so-called electromagnetic worldview (see Section 1.3.1).
4 Ritz mostly signed his own name “Walter” but the editor of his collected papers, Pierre Weiss, used
“Walther”, which seems to have made that the more common spelling (Martinez 2004, p. 4).
5 See Appendix B for a brief history of spectroscopy.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
Taking the lesson of Schott’s analysis to heart, Nicholson assumed that the elements
of the periodic table, with their exceedingly complicated spectra, are compounds of four
simple proto-elements (or “protyles” as he called them), each consisting of a single
electron ring, with 2, 3, 4, and 5 electrons, respectively (unlike Bohr, he ruled out rings
with just one electron to avoid dipole radiation, the main source of radiative instability).
Contrary to Rutherford’s model, Nicholson thus assumed that all atoms of the periodic
table, including hydrogen, would have several nuclei. Unbound protyles, Nicholson
argued, would only be found in highly energetic astrophysical environments. Hence the
names he chose for two of them: coronium and nebulium.
Nicholson ran into the same problem as Bohr in the Rutherford memorandum:
stability considerations provided a relation between radius and frequency of his electron
rings but did not determine the values of these parameters separately. To fix these
values, Nicholson matched the frequencies of the rotating electron rings of coronium
and nebulium to the frequencies of lines found in the spectra of the solar corona and
stellar nebulae (now known to come from ionized oxygen, nitrogen, and iron).
In a paper of June 1912, Nicholson (1912) noted that the value of the angular
momentum per electron in his protyles is always close to an integral number times
Planck’s constant. Nicholson saw this numerical agreement as further confirmation of the
existence of his proto-elements. His use of Planck’s constant was not based on a careful
reading of the quantum literature. While Bohr had absorbed developments in Britain as
well as on the continent, especially Germany, Nicholson remained firmly ensconced in
the British tradition.
Bohr was troubled by the similarity of Nicholson’s models to his own and even more
so by discrepancies between Nicholson’s numerical results and his own calculations in
the Rutherford memorandum. Both Bohr and Nicholson had used classical mechanics
and electrostatics to find the stability conditions for rings of electrons rotating around
positively charged nuclei and then determined the size and rotation frequency of these
rings by imposing the condition that the kinetic energy or the angular momentum, two
closely related quantities, is proportional to the rotation frequency with a proportionality
constant related to Planck’s constant (Nicholson on the basis of the frequency of lines in
the coronal spectrum, Bohr on the basis of a dispersion frequency in molecular hydro-
gen). Nicholson, however, found much lower binding energies and much larger radii
than Bohr. Bohr eventually pinpointed what lay behind these discrepancies. Nicholson’s
calculation pertained to highly excited states whereas his own pertained to the ground
state. This was the first time Bohr explicitly made this distinction. In the Rutherford
memorandum, he had tacitly limited his attention to the ground state.
1.2.9 The Balmer formula and the birth of the Bohr model
of the atom
Despite his engagement with Nicholson’s theory, Bohr still showed no interest either
in excited states or in spectroscopy. As he told Rutherford in a letter of January 31,
1913, he was not calculating “the frequencies corresponding to the lines in the visible
spectrum” and continued to focus on “the constitution of the atoms and molecules
in their permanent [i.e., ground] state” (Bohr 1972–2008, Vol. 2, p. 580). But Bohr’s
focus was about to shift. In February 1913, Hans Marius Hansen, a young Danish
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where we followed modern usage in our choice of letters for the various quantities: 1/λ
(equal to ν/c, the frequency divided by the velocity of light) is the wavenumber of a
line in a spectral series satisfying the formula, R is the Rydberg constant, named after
the Swedish spectroscopist Johannes Rydberg (see Plate 16), and n and m are integers
such that m > n (Hermann 1971, p. 157). For the Balmer series in hydrogen, n = 2 and
m = 3, 4, 5, . . . .
Bohr later claimed that “as soon as I saw Balmer’s formula, the whole thing was
immediately clear to me” (Rosenfeld 1963, pp. xxxxix). While this may have been an
exaggeration, it is true that, sometime between first laying eyes on the Balmer formula
in February and mailing a first version of the first installment of his 1913 trilogy to
Rutherford in early March, Bohr recognized that the right-hand side of the Balmer
formula could be interpreted as the difference in energy between two quantized orbits
in a slightly modified version of the model of the hydrogen atom he had proposed
and analyzed in the Rutherford memorandum. First, as he had come to realize while
grappling with Nicholson’s theory, he had to allow a whole range of quantized orbits
rather than just the one ground state, labeled by integers. Second, he had to change
the proportionality constant in the quantization condition E kin = Kν from K = 0.6h to
K = 12 τ h, where τ is an integer labeling the quantized orbits in his model. Identifying
the terms on the right-hand side of the formula for the Balmer series as the energies of
quantized orbits in his modified model for the hydrogen atom, Bohr could express the
Rydberg constant in terms of fundamental constants of nature. Inserting the available
values for these constants, he arrived at a value for the Rydberg constant remarkably
close to the one found in spectroscopic measurements.
What remained unclear, however, was the mechanism by which the hydrogen atom,
as modeled by Bohr, would produce the Balmer lines. The first installment of his
trilogy, the paper in which Bohr (1913b) first published his derivation of the Balmer
formula, still contains traces of a mechanism Bohr considered before settling on the now
familiar mechanism of electrons jumping between orbits. Bohr imagined that radiation
was emitted when a hydrogen nucleus captures an electron into one of the quantized
orbits labeled by τ. In the Rutherford memorandum, Bohr had ignored the radiative
instability of these orbits. In the 1913 trilogy he made it one of the pillars of his theory
that electrons do not radiate as long as they stay in the same quantized orbit. He thus
guaranteed the radiative stability of these orbits by fiat, i.e., by suspending the laws of
classical electrodynamics for them, with the exception of Coulomb’s law, which was
needed for their mechanical stability. Bohr set the frequency of the radiation in this
emission-upon-electron-capture scheme equal to ν τ /2, the average of the frequency zero
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
of the electron before capture and the frequency ν τ of its orbit after capture. Bohr needed
this factor of 12 to justify the quantization condition Ekin = 12 τ hντ , which he knew led to
the correct value of the Rydberg constant. Even with this factor, however, the emission-
upon-electron-capture mechanism only allowed Bohr to recover the Balmer formula for
the special case that the integer m labeling the initial state of the electron is infinite and
the right-hand side of the formula reduces to R/n2.
To account for the lines in the Balmer series, Bohr had to invent a new mechanism
that would produce radiation of the frequency ν given by the Balmer formula for n = 2
and m = 3, 4, 5, . . . The mechanism he came up with is based on two assumptions. First,
radiation is emitted only when electrons jump from one orbit to another. Second, the
frequency of this radiation is given by the energy difference between these two orbits
divided by Planck’s constant. This is the famous Bohr frequency condition. The first
assumption, as before, suspended most of the laws of electrodynamics for Bohr’s electron
orbits. The second assumption amounted to another radical departure from these laws.
Classically, one would expect a continuum of frequencies if an electron goes from one
orbit to another. Bohr, however, assumed that transitions from one orbit to another would
result in monochromatic (or, as he called it, homogeneous) radiation. Moreover, the
frequency of this monochromatic radiation is different from the orbital frequency of the
electron in either the initial or the final orbit, as well as from the average of the two. Not
only was this unheard of in classical electrodynamics, it also meant that Bohr had to find
a new justification for his quantum condition Ekin = 12 τ hντ , where ν τ , as the subscript
indicates, refers to the orbital frequencies ν n and ν m , not to the radiation frequency νm→n
given by the Balmer formula.
To find this new justification, he started by imposing the more general quantum
condition E kin = f (τ )hν τ. He then used the form of the Balmer formula to establish
that the function f must be linear in τ, i.e., f (τ ) = cτ. To ensure that his quantum
theory would merge properly with classical theory in the regime where the latter was
expected to remain valid, Bohr now demanded that, for large enough values of N, the
difference between the radiation frequency νN→N−1 given by the Balmer formula and
the orbital frequencies ν N ≈ ν N−1 be arbitrarily small. He showed that it follows from this
requirement that c = 12. This argument can be seen as an application of an embryonic
version of what Bohr would later call the correspondence principle (see Section 1.3.4
below).
Severing the relation between orbital frequencies and radiation frequencies (except
in the limit of high quantum numbers) was perhaps Bohr’s most radical break with
classical theory. As Heilbron and Kuhn (1969, p. 263) noted in their classic study of the
genesis of the Bohr atom: “That a spectral line of a given frequency must be produced by
a charge vibrating at the same frequency was a consequence of electromagnetic theory
which even Planck and Einstein had not thought to challenge.” As Planck put it in his
Nobel lecture:
That in the atom certain quantized orbits should play a special role could well be granted;
somewhat less easy to accept is the further assumption that the electrons moving on
these curvilinear orbits . . . radiate no energy. But that the sharply defined frequency
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of an emitted light quantum should be different from the frequency of the emitting
electron would be regarded by a theoretician who had grown up in the classical school as
monstrous and almost inconceivable [eine ungeheuerliche und für das Vorstellungsvermögen
fast unerträgliche Zumutung] (Planck 1920, p. 19).
Shortly after he published his first papers on wave mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger
complained about the same feature in equally strong language. Ever since 1914, he
wrote to Lorentz on June 6, 1926, he had considered it to be something “so monstrous
[Ungeheuerliches], that I should like to characterize the excitation of light in this way
as really almost inconceivable [undenkbar]” (Lorentz 2008, Doc. 413, p. 615; English
translation in Klein 1967, p. 61).
That this insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s
unique instinct . . . to discover the major laws of spectral lines . . . appeared to me like a
miracle and appears as a miracle even today. This is the highest form of musicality in the
sphere of thought (Einstein 1949, pp. 44–47).
Einstein (1916a, 1917a) incorporated key elements of Bohr’s model in the quantum
theory of radiation he proposed when he returned to the quantum quandary after
completing his general theory of relativity in 1915–6.6 Today’s textbook picture of the
Bohr atom is a composite of Bohr’s 1913 model and Einstein’s 1916–7 theory. Bohr
is responsible for the representation of different energy levels by quantized orbits in a
miniature solar system and for the radical assumptions that electrons only radiate in
transitions from one orbit to another and that the frequency of the emitted radiation
is different from the orbital frequencies, yet monochromatic. Einstein took over these
radical assumptions but without the picture of a miniature solar system. He remained
agnostic as to how the quantized energy states in Bohr’s model should be represented.
Einstein is responsible for introducing another part of the textbook picture, namely that
the transition of an electron from one state to another is accompanied by the emission or
absorption of a light quantum in a definite but unpredictable direction. Like most of their
contemporaries, Bohr staunchly opposed Einstein’s light-quantum hypothesis because
it appeared to be irreconcilable with interference phenomena. Bohr took the more
conservative point of view that the quantum of energy an electron loses when it jumps
from one orbit to another is emitted in the form of a spherical electromagnetic wave.
invaluable summaries of the evolving state of the field, not only for contemporary
workers, but also for historians of physics almost a century later. Although our discussion
in Part Two will be organized along conceptual themes, Sommerfeld’s role in the
development is so significant that we will pause here to give an overview of his career,
leading up to the critical year 1915. Toward the end of that year, he introduced the general
quantization principles that would guide the old quantum theory for the next decade
(Sommerfeld 1915a). Similar biographical information for Planck, Einstein, and Bohr—
to the extent that it helps illuminate their early contributions to quantum theory—will be
given in due course in Chs. 2–4.
7 This section owes much to Michael Eckert’s (2013b) excellent biography of Sommerfeld.
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will see in Section 1.3.5, Sommerfeld’s work on the old quantum theory would result in a
much more accurate, and convincing, demonstration of the correctness of the relativistic
formula for the velocity dependence of mass.
Sommerfeld made his first foray into quantum theory with his so-called “h-theory”, in
which Planck’s constant was presumed to play a role in the energetics of beta and gamma
radiation, X-ray production from cathode rays, and eventually even in an explanation
of the photoelectric effect that eschewed Einstein’s light quanta. In the first two cases,
the critical phenomenon was the emission of electromagnetic radiation when a charged
particle (in both cases, an electron) undergoes either acceleration or deceleration, as
required by Maxwellian electrodynamics. In the context of X-ray production, cathode
ray electrons impinging on an anti-cathode (positively charged electrode) would undergo
Bremsstrahlung or ‘braking radiation’—a term coined by Sommerfeld (1909)—resulting
in the emission of polarized and anisotropic electromagnetic radiation, which was termed
the “primary” radiation, to be distinguished from a separate secondary X-ray component
which was not polarized, isotropic, and containing discrete frequency components
characteristic of the composition of the anti-cathode. In the case of beta and gamma
radiation, it had been observed that the emission of beta particles from radioactive
materials was almost always accompanied by gamma radiation, which was assumed to
be due to the acceleration of electrons leaving the atom (the mechanism of acceleration
being unknown).
In 1911, Sommerfeld invoked Planck’s constant in an attempt to explain the energetics
of gamma-ray emissions accompanying beta radiation (Sommerfeld 1911b) and the
anisotropic (noncharacteristic) X-rays emitted when cathode rays strike a metal target
(Sommerfeld 1911a). The subject of X-rays was of particular relevance in Munich,
where Sommerfeld’s experimental counterpart, Wilhelm Röntgen, the discoverer of said
rays, continued to work intensively on their properties. It was primarily in the hope of
theoretical assistance in deciphering the properties of X-rays, that Röntgen had secured
the chair in Munich for Sommerfeld, having to overcome significant opposition from
none other than Lindemann, Sommerfeld’s doctoral supervisor in Königsberg (Eckert
2013b, p. 144).
The role played in Sommerfeld’s “h-theory” by Planck’s constant (as a unit of action =
energy times time) was to constrain the time duration of acceleration (in the beta-gamma
case) or deceleration (in the X-ray case) by equating it to Planck’s constant divided by
the corresponding energy gain (or loss). None of this made any sense, as subsequent
developments were to show,8 and the X-ray experiments planned by Sommerfeld in
1912 to quantitatively test his h-hypothesis were in any event derailed by Laue’s use of
the apparatus for the far more consequential discovery of crystal X-ray diffraction.9 As it
8 For example, the emission of beta and gamma radiation from radioactive nuclei are independent events,
with the gamma radiation the result of a previous beta transition leaving the final nucleus in an excited quantum
state, which later drops to the ground state with the emission of a gamma photon. The gamma radiation is not
associated with the acceleration of the beta electron. The temporal relation of beta and gamma radiation in
radioactive decay remained controversial for a considerable time, as witnessed by the title of a paper by Lise
Meitner (see Plate 24) from 1925: “The gamma radiation of the actinium sequence and the proof that the
gamma rays are only emitted after a completed radioactive decay” (Meitner 1925, cf. Sime 1996, p. 94).
9 See Eckert (2015a, pp. 11-12; 2015b) for a detailed discussion of these developments.
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Arnold Schoenberg, Musical Anarchist
Richard Strauss was the last of the great classic school of German
composers, which for two hundred years had led the world in music.
Curious as it seems, he has not influenced directly the younger
composers, who turned to Debussy, Busoni, Schoenberg and
Stravinsky. (Page 410.)
Busoni the Great
Béla Bartók (1881) and his friend Soltan Kodály (1882) have done
much to bring Hungarian folk music into the modern world, for they
are steeped in folk tunes, which they use with skill and imagination.
Bartók has written a short opera, two ballets, orchestral works, string
quartets, violin sonata, and many piano compositions. His children’s
pieces are delightful, based as they are on Hungarian folk tunes.
We have spoken at length of the gypsy music of the Hungarians
brought to us by Brahms, Liszt and Sarasate (violinist and
composer). We also told you that the Hungarians were Magyars.
Adjoran Otvos, in the League of Composers Review says: “Bartók
and Kodály have accomplished a pioneer work of quite a different
nature, an exploration into the folk music of Hungary which has
yielded a collection of historic significance, the most important and
only authentic one made in that country.
“Bartók, poor and supported only by a scholarship, started in 1905,
an investigation of the music of his race. Spending a week with a
friend in the country, he heard a servant, while at work, singing a
tune quite different from the hybrid (mixed breed) gypsy airs which
pass for Magyar music, in Hungary and elsewhere. He contrived to
conceal himself and day after day, while the servant worked,
recorded a number of songs whose primitive character, he at once
recognized. With this impetus, he embarked on a tour which lasted
over two years, as long as his money held out. On his journeys among
the peasants he met Kodály, out on a similar mission of research.
Without previous inkling of each other’s aims, they proceeded
together, recording the ancient songs of the Magyars in the
compilation which is famous today.”
Ernest von Dohnányi
Béla Bartók.
(Hungarian)
Photograph, Victor
Georg.
Louis Gruenberg.
(American)
Composers of Today.
Courtesy of “The
Musical Digest.”
G. Francesco Malipiero.
(Italian)
Courtesy of “The
Musical
Quarterly.”
Alfredo Casella.
(Italian)
Photograph,
Mendoza Galleries.
Arnold Bax.
(English)
Photograph,
Bertam Pach.
Eugene Goossens.
(English)
Composers of Today.