![]() ![]() Heisenberg was invited to speak about his paper and its later further developments by Born and his assistant/former student Pascual Jordan (1902-80). For I wanted, in any event, to make myself intelligble, and more especially to get Einstein interested in the new possibilities.” It goes without saying, that I now prepared my lecture with the greatest care. “Einstein would thus be in the audience I would make his personal acquaintance. As Heisenberg later wrote (Heisenberg, 1983), Referred to as the “citadel of physics” by Heisenberg, the University of Berlin was in 1926 also home Nobel laureates Max Planck (1858-1947), Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Walther Nernst (1864-1941). Heisenberg had been invited to speak at Max von Laue (1879-1960)’s famous physics colloquium on the ‘new’ quantum mechanics at the Humboldt University of Berlin (then Friedrich Wilhelm University), where Einstein was teaching. Heisenberg first secured an audience with Herr Einstein in early 1926. Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen (“Quantum theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations“). A Privatdozent there starting in 1924, he soon travelled to commence research with Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. Also a student of mathematics, he had studied with David Hilbert (1862-1943) at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. Heisenberg’s thesis had been on the topic of turbulence, discussing the stability of laminar flow and the nature of turbulent flow. ![]() at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich under the supervision of Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) who introduced him to Bohr in June of 1922. Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, divorced and re-married, been promoted to full professor and entered into politics by joining the League of Nations as the delegate from Germany. Although Einstein was only 46 years old at the time, the two men were a generation apart and indeed, in very different stages of their lives. Heisenberg’s formulation accounted for quantum jumps, thereby supplanting Niels Bohr (1885-1962)’s model of electron orbits by interpreting the physical properties of particles as matrices that evolve over time.Īlbert Einstein (1879-1955), a proponent (and indeed pioneer) of the ‘old’ quantum mechanics disagreed strongly with the implications of Heisenberg’s paper. The first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics had been born. Upon reading Heisenberg’s paper, Born realized that in Heisenberg’s new formulation, the classical variables of position and momentum could be represented by matrices which can be multiplied together like numbers, albeit with the crucial difference that the order of multiplication matters. Recovering from hay fever on the island of Heligoland, "still very uncertain about it", Heisenberg in July 1925 sent his manuscript to Max Born (1882-1970) for review. A mere 24 years old, Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) in 1925 developed a treatment of electron behavior based solely on directly observable quantities such as the frequencies of light that atoms absorb and emit. ![]()
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