Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2011
Volume 56, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 30–May 3 2011; Anaheim, California
Session B1: Solvay at One Hundred; Pais Prize Talk |
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Sponsoring Units: DPF FHP Chair: Daniel Kleppner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Room: Grand A |
Saturday, April 30, 2011 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
B1.00001: The Solvay Council, 1911: ``A kind of private congress'' Invited Speaker: The photograph of its participants gathered around the conference table at the first Solvay Congress in physics has long presented an iconic image of physics in the early twentieth century, and the event has commonly been celebrated for its distinctive role in the propagation of quantum theory, as well as for the rich heritage in subsequent conferences that it initiated. Yet it is not often appreciated just how unusual this first congress or ``council'' was. Convened and funded by the Belgian industrialist Ernst Solvay, it was conceived and planned by the Berlin physical chemist Walther Nernst, with a zealous attention to detail that extended to entreating participants to keep its proceedings confidential until it had actually occurred. Kept private to facilitate later public notice, I will argue that this conference also helped fashion a distinctive (and selective) view of the past. This paper combines an examination of the planning and conduct of the congress with a study of the earliest uses of general concepts of ``classical'' theory from the late nineteenth century, in order to argue that the Solvay congress was important not just to the wider propagation of quantum theory, but to the formation of the conceptual framework within which we now cast this era and its physics: the contrast between classical and modern theory. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 30, 2011 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
B1.00002: Solvay 1927: Quantum Theory at the Crossroads Invited Speaker: We reconsider the crucial 1927 Solvay conference in the context of current research in the foundations of quantum theory. Contrary to folklore, the interpretation question was not settled at this conference and no consensus was reached; instead, a range of sharply conflicting views were presented and extensively discussed. Today, there is no longer an established or dominant interpretation of quantum theory, so it is important to re-evaluate the historical sources and keep the interpretation debate open. The proceedings of the conference contain much unexpected material, and are remarkable for their clear identification of key issues that remain controversial to this day. After providing a general overview, we focus on the extensive discussions of de Broglie's pilot-wave theory, which de Broglie presented for a many-body system, including the much misunderstood critique by Pauli. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 30, 2011 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
B1.00003: Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics Talk: Shelter Island, Pocono, Oldstone, 1947-49, Revisited Invited Speaker: The historic June 1947 Shelter Island Conference was the first of three small conferences on theoretical physics sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. It opened with a report of the results of Lamb and Retherford's and those of Nafe, Nelson and Rabi's experiments on the spectrum of hydrogen. The challenge to explain the accurate numbers they had obtained stimulated a renewed interest in quantum electrodynamics (QED) and became the point of departure for the post World War II developments in quantum field theory: effective Lorentz invariant computational methods, Feynman diagrams, renormalization theory. The recent discovery of Hans Bethe's extensive notes on the Shelter Island conference allows a reconsideration of the role played by Kramers, Oppenheimer and Weisskopf in these developments. The 1948 Pocono Conference at which Schwinger and Feynman presented their formulation of QED, and the 1949 Oldstone conference, at which Dyson summarized his researches and his views regarding renormalizability, give proof of the deep changes in the conceptualization, description and representation of nature that had been brought about by the work of Weisskopf, Schwinger, Feynman, and Dyson. [Preview Abstract] |
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