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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.

The professors Theo Geisel, Detlev Bucholz and Kurt Schönhammer (from left to right) during the celebration in the Theoretische Physik.
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