Epilogue

Abstract

“Planck was the authority, Einstein the genius, and Sommerfeld the teacher.” Thus, one writer at once trenchantly and succinctly summed up the roles of the most important exponents of theoretical physics in its “golden age.” Another writer stressed the orientation towards problems that typified the theoretical physics of Sommerfeld and his school, in contrast to the physics of a Planck, an Einstein, or a Bohr, whose physics was focused on principles. And Sommerfeld’s biography does offer many instances of this approach. “How this comes about remains utterly obscure. But the consequences of what is postulatedhave to be thought through.” Thus, in 1927 had Sommerfeld deferred all foundational questions regarding the Fermi-Dirac statistics so that, unencumbered by them, he could attack a string of unsolved problems in the electron theory of metals with this new statistics (Sect. 9.3). One might well preface numerous other works by Sommerfeld with the identical dictum.