Abstract
“When I travel abroad I feel I am not merely a private individual and globetrotter, but an ambassador of German culture in the realm of science.” Thus Sommerfeld began his lecture on December 8, 1928, in Tokyo. Tokyo was one of many stops on an 8-month world tour on which Sommerfeld carried out this self-imposed cultural mission. The idea of a world tour occurred to him after the Volta Congress in September 1927 when Millikan proposed a split guest professorship that would take him to the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology for the winter semester of 1928/1929. Though that plan fell through, Millikan wanted at least to bring Sommerfeld to Cal Tech: “pasadena [sic] wants you definitely winter quarter twenty-nine,” he telegraphed to Munich. After brief deliberation, Sommerfeld accepted the invitation and announced that this time he would travel to America from the east, across the Pacific. He may have been giving himself an unusual present on the occasion of his 60th birthday, which he would celebrate somewhere in Japan on December 5, 1928. Or, was he perhaps dodging festivities threatening him at home on this day? Bethe believed that “A major motivation for this trip was that he did not want to be in Munich on his 60th birthday.”
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Sommerfeld, Entwicklung, 1929b.
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- 178.
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- 182.
Hoddeson/Baym/Eckert, Development, 1987; Eckert, Sommerfeld, 1990.
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Eckert, M. (2013). Cultural Ambassador. In: Arnold Sommerfeld. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7461-6_10
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