Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2008 APS April Meeting and HEDP/HEDLA Meeting
Volume 53, Number 5
Friday–Tuesday, April 11–15, 2008; St. Louis, Missouri
Session R6: 80 Years of Quantum Mechanics: A New International Project |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Clayton A. Gearhart, St. John's University Room: Hyatt Regency St. Louis Riverfront (formerly Adam's Mark Hotel), Promenade D |
Monday, April 14, 2008 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
R6.00001: Van Vleck and Slater: Two Americans on the Road to Matrix Mechanics Invited Speaker: I relate the story of how matrix mechanics grew out of the treatment of optical dispersion in the old quantum theory, paying special attention to the contributions of the American theoretical physicists John H. Van Vleck and John C. Slater. Van Vleck shares the credit with Max Born for having been the first to publish a full derivation of the crucial Kramers dispersion formula using Bohr's correspondence principle. Slater was one of the architects of the short-lived but influential Bohr-Kramers-Slater (BKS) theory that helped popularize the so-called Ersatz- or virtual oscillators central both to the treatment of dispersion in the old quantum theory and to the transition to matrix mechanics. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 14, 2008 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
R6.00002: Creative Confusion. Quantum Theory on the Way to Wave Mechanics Invited Speaker: When wave mechanics was formulated by de Broglie and Schr\"{o}dinger in the mid-twenties, there was practically no empirical evidence for wave-like behavior of matter. What then were the motivations for pursuing an idea that was rather at odds with the discontinuity that quantum theory seemed to demand? Paradoxically, they can be found in the attempts to understand the quantum nature of light, for which just at that time empirical evidence could not be ignored anymore. In my talk, I will argue that ``wave-particle duality'' was initially nothing more than a confusion of competing theoretical explanations. It was in statistical mechanics where this idea first took on a more concrete form of a symmetry of two different theoretical explanations. And it was statistical mechanics that allowed this model of dual explanations to be transferred to the theory of matter. This transfer culminated in Schr\"{o}dinger's paper of December 1925 ``On Einstein's Gas Theory,'' which explicitly uses the symmetry of explanations to motivate a wave theory of matter. It is here that Schr\"{o}dinger's equivalent to Heisenberg's ``Umdeutung'' (reinterpretation) of mechanical quantities is to be found, not in his more famous 1926 papers on atomic theory. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 14, 2008 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
R6.00003: "Knabenphysik": The birth of quantum mechanics from a postdoctoral viewpoint Invited Speaker: |
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