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    Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger
    Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger
    Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger
    Ebook119 pages

    Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger

    By Albert Einstein, K. Przibram and Martin J. Klein

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    About this ebook

    A lively collection of Einstein’s groundbreaking scientific correspondence on modern physics

    Imagine getting four of the greatest minds of modern physics in a room together to explain and debate the theories and innovations of their day. This is the fascinating experience of reading Letters on Wave Mechanics, the correspondence between H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein.

    These remarkable letters illuminate not only the basis of Schrödinger’s work in wave mechanics, but also how great scientific minds debated and challenged the ever-changing theories of the day and ultimately embraced an elegant solution to the riddles of quantum theory. Their collected correspondence offers insight into both the personalities and professional aspirations that played a part in this theoretical breakthrough.

    This authorized ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilosophical Library Open Road
    Release dateSep 27, 2011
    ISBN9781453204641
    Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger
    Author

    Albert Einstein

    Albert Einstein was a German mathematician and physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. His work also had a major impact on the development of atomic energy. In his later years, Einstein focused on unified field theory.

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    Letters on Wave Mechanics - Albert Einstein

    Letters on Wave Mechanics

    Correspondence with H.A. Lorentz, Max Planck and Erwin

    Schrödinger

    Albert Einstein

    Edited by K. Przibram

    logo3

    Contents

    Foreword

    Introduction

    Letters 1–8

    1. Planck to Schrödinger

    2. Schrödinger to Planck

    3. Planck to Schrödinger

    4. Schrödinger to Planck

    5. Planck to Schrödinger

    6. Schrödinger to Planck

    7. Planck to Schrödinger

    8. Schrödinger to Planck

    Letters 9–18

    9. Einstein to Schrödinger

    10. Einstein to Schrödinger

    11. Schrödinger to Einstein

    12. Einstein to Schrödinger

    13. Schrödinger to Einstein

    14. Einstein to Schrödinger

    15. Schrödinger to Einstein

    16. Einstein to Schrödinger

    17. Schrödinger to Einstein

    18. Einstein to Schrödinger

    Letters 19–21

    19. Lorentz to Schrödinger

    20. Schrödinger to Lorentz

    21. Lorentz to Schrödinger

    A Biography of Albert Einstein

    Notes

    Foreword

    A GREAT PHYSICAL THEORY like Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, when it is confirmed, takes on its own impersonal existence in the course of time, becomes completely detached from its originator, and is finally received as self-evident. In this way one forgets how many inner struggles, hopes, and disappointments were bound up with its beginnings and one forgets too all the pros and cons of contemporary reactions to it. This more personal side can be reawakened into life if there are contemporary letters like the ones reproduced here.

    Schrödinger’s widow, Mrs. Annemarie Schrödinger, cherished the wish that her husband’s correspondence concerning wave mechanics might be published among the works of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and so be made accessible to a wider scientific circle. She turned to the undersigned, as the senior among Austrian physicists, with the request that he make her wish known to the Academy. A motion concerning the publication of the letters was passed unanimously and with joyful gratitude at the meeting of the Academy’s Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences on 25 January 1962; the editing was entrusted to the undersigned.

    Little needs to be added to the letters; they speak for themselves. Apart from their essential content, they reveal something of the personalities of the four men of genius, corresponding to Buffon’s sentence, Le style c’est l’homme.

    There are some omissions in the carbon copies of Schrödinger’s letters, which were all that were available here, since the mathematical formulas that were entered by hand on the typed originals are often missing. These omissions were supplied according to the meaning and by comparison with Schrödinger’s published works. The other scientists’ communications are all in the form of hand written letters, or postcards (No. 1, 7, 10, and 12). A calculation on wave packets that filled many pages was omitted from Lorentz’s second letter (No. 21); also omitted were the beginnings of letters 8, 15 and 16, which contained only personal matters, and a paragraph in letter 8 dealing with molecular statistics. The sketch in No. 12 is a facsimile in natural size. All texts are reproduced faithfully—salve errore et omissione; several inconsistencies in punctuation and style have been left uncorrected. Some (numbered) footnotes, set in smaller print, may be of assistance in giving a broader orientation.

    We express our thanks to the heirs of Max Planck and H. A. Lorentz as well as to the Executor of the Estate of Albert Einstein for permission to publish the corresponding letters, and to the latter also for photographic copies of letters 13 and 15, (as well as the letter referred to in the footnote to letter 13), no carbon copies of which were to be found here.

    Finally we thank the Springer-Verlag of Vienna for undertaking the publication and for its painstaking accomplishment.

    K. Przibram

    Vienna, Summer 1963

    Introduction

    "IN THIS ARTICLE I should like to show, first of all for the simplest case of the (non-relativistic and unperturbed) hydrogen atom, that the usual rule for quantization can be replaced by another requirement in which there is no longer any mention of ‘integers’. The integral property follows, rather, in the same natural way that, say, the number of nodes of a vibrating string must be an integer. The new interpretation can be generalized and, I believe, strikes very deeply into the true nature of the quantization rules. With these words Erwin Schrödinger began the first paper of his series, Quantization as a Proper Value Problem", sent off to the Annalen der Physik at the end of January, 1926¹. By the end of June he had completed four more major papers developing and applying the concepts and methods of a new wave mechanics that he hoped would be related to classical mechanics in the same way that wave optics is related to geometrical optics. What impressed him most in his elegant theory, perhaps even more than its evident power to treat a wide range of basic atomic problems, was its naturalness, its apparently intuitive character for anyone at home in classical physics, and the way in which it seemed to avoid the most perplexing and disturbing features of the existing quantum theory.

    For Schrödinger was writing a quarter of a century after Max Planck had broken with the past by introducing energy quanta into physics, in order to explain the black-body radiation law. During those twenty-five years physicists had been confronted with a series of shocking departures from established modes of thought: Planck’s treatment of the energy as a discrete rather than a continuous variable was followed by Einstein’s modest proposals that radiation must be viewed as somehow composed of independent particles of energy and that a quantum theory of matter as well as radiation must be constructed. In 1913 Niels Bohr compounded these heresies in a theory that explicitly denied the validity of electrodynamics for atomic radiation processes and made the frequencies of atomic spectral lines independent of the frequencies of electronic motions within the atom. Bohr’s ideas, strange as they seemed, served as the starting point for a serious and partly successful attempt to construct a theoretical structure that could explain the physical and chemical properties of matter, including the mysterious regularities recorded by the spectroscopists. By the spring of 1925 the theoretical picture had

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