Göttingen celebrates the 75th anniversary of Quantum Mechanics
In the early twenties of the last century there were indications that
the problems of the "old" Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum theory could only be
solved by a completely new formulation. Werner Heisenberg who had received
his PhD in Munich working with Sommerfeld started to focus on this problem
when he joined Max Born's group at the Institute of Theoretical Physics
in Göttingen as a post doc.
During a stay on the island of Helgoland in June 1925 Heisenberg made
the breaktrough. He wrote a paper and back in Göttingen gave it to Born in
the middle of July . Heisenberg asked Born to send it to "Zeitschrift für
Physik" if he felt that his ideas make sense and
again left Göttingen heading towards the North Sea because of his hay fever.
Born quickly realized
the importance of Heisenberg's ideas and submitted the paper. Quantum
mechanics in its first form was born. A few days later Born realized that
Heisenberg's "multiplication rule" was nothing but the multiplication of
matrices. Therefore Heisenbergs' approach was called "matrix mechanics".
In another seminal paper ("Dreimännerarbeit") Born, Heisenberg and Jordan
presented the complete mathematical formulation of matrix mechanics as early
as November of the same year.
The second act of the story began in Zurich when Erwin Schrödinger submitted
his paper "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" (Quantization as an eigenvalue
problem) in January 1926 to the "Annalen der Physik". He quickly published
several additional papers on his new "wave mechanics". For a short time
it seemed as if there were two different explanations for the world of
atoms - matrix mechanics and wave mechanics - but within the same year
Schrödinger himself showed the complete equivalence of the two approaches.
Through the revolutionary year of 1925 Göttingen has a firm position
in the history of physics. That was a good reason for some members of the
physics faculty to open a bottle of Champagne.
Prof. Dr. K. Schönhammer
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Last modified: Thu Aug 29 13:29:59 CEST 2002
