Niels Bohr and the Problems of Atomic Theory

Abstract

Having completed his survey of relativity theory in 1921, Pauli switched his concern to quantum theory.¹ He worked first as Max Born’s assistant for the academic year 1921–1922, sharing in Born’s own first attack on the problems of the atom. By the time he wrote the letter to Eddington in September 1923 he had also worked for a year in Copenhagen with Bohr.² Neither of the physicists with whom he worked most closely in this period, Bohr or Heisenberg, had played any active part in relativity theory or the search for a unified theory. Indeed Bohr, uniquely among the great theoreticians of the period, appears to have displayed little interest in unification and little if any sympathy with relativistic thinking and analysis. But despite this difference, the new environment was far from unconnected with the old. Born started work on quantum theory at about the same time as Pauli, at the urging of the experimentalist James Franck, who was his colleague at Göttingen and a close ally of Bohr’s.³ Before then his orbit had been much closer to the problems of relativity theory than to those of quanta, and he had, moreover, shown some sympathy with Pauli’s ideas.⁴ Heisenberg had been Pauli’s colleague as a student in Munich under Sommerfeld, and had already then discussed the fundamental problems of physics with him.