Abstract
The history of quantum physics and early quantum mechanics took place mainly in Germany and Copenhagen. British institutions were slow in understanding and accepting the radical transformations involved in the new theory. In this paper I discuss the ways in which quantum physics was slowly incorporated in the University of Cambridge, with an emphasis on the pedagogical and research practices in the old university. For an older generation, the problem with quantum theory was its distance from what true physics was and had to be: a set of mechanical and dynamical models grounded on the mathematics of the continuum. A first generation of converts to the new theory, like Charles Galton Darwin, were quick to incorporate the new theory in the Cambridge syllabus, but only in continuity with the old mathematical tools. As a consequence, wave mechanics à la Schrödinger was easier to accept than the new formalisms of matrix mechanics. It was only with the work of Paul A. M. Dirac, whose initial training and career took place outside Cambridge, that the old university finally regained its relevance at the forefront of quantum theoretical physics.
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Notes
- 1.
Archive for the History of Quantum Physics, Darwin to Bohr, 30.05.1919, microfilm BSC 1, 4.
- 2.
Archive for the History of Quantum Physics, Bohr to Rutherford, 2.05.1932, microfilm BSC 1, 4.
- 3.
For discussions on the centre-periphery historiography see Gavroglu et al. (2008).
- 4.
- 5.
Lodge’s Presidential Address is also a manifesto in defence of spiritualism, psychic research, and a certain unity of Nature with the Creator.
- 6.
I use the expression “last generation of wranglers” in a rather loose way: 1909 was the last year in which Cambridge classified its MT students in the traditional hierarchical way and implemented a thorough reform of the Mathematical Tripos, with more emphasis on pure mathematics. Notwithstanding these reforms, the ethos of the MT did not change immediately and MT students before the Great War can easily be labeled as wranglers of the last generation.
- 7.
In one of his first papers, Darwin had assumed that (i) the loss of energy of α-particles was due to interactions of these only with the electrons in a Rutherford atom, and (ii) that electrons could be considered to be free in the atom. In rejecting these two assumptions, Bohr shifted his interest from the behaviour of electrons to the structure of the atom. In a letter to his brother Harald on June 12, 1912, Bohr explains how “a couple of days ago I had a little idea for understanding the absorption of α-particles (the story is this: a young mathematician here, C.G. Darwin, (grandson of the right Darwin) has just published a theory about it, and I thought that it was not only incorrect mathematically … but also very unsatisfactory in its basic conception), and I have worked out a little theory about it, which … can perhaps shed a little light on some things concerning the structure of atoms” (in Heilbron and Kuhn 1969, p. 237).
- 8.
Perhaps the most significant example of this Cambridge culture was J.J. Thomson, whose whole research project on discharge tubes can be understood as basically an attempt to give continuation to Maxwell’s Treatise by understanding the interaction between ether and matter. See Navarro (2005).
- 9.
G.P. Thomson’s article only studies the hydrogen atom and ‘a simple extension of the above accounts also for the stationary states of ionized helium, and gives approximately the energy of the K ring of electrons’.
- 10.
Oral interview with G.P. Thomson, Archive for the History of Quantum Physics, Tape T2, side 2, 15.
- 11.
Fowler, Hartree, and Dirac were visitors of Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen.
- 12.
Fowler to Dirac, 12 June 1927, DRAC 3/1, Churchill College Archives.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was partially supported by the projects FFI2012–33550 of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Government of Spain ), and IT644-13 of the Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture (Basque Government).
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Navarro, J. (2015). A Peripheral Centre. Early Quantum Physics at Cambridge. In: Simões, A., Diogo, M., Gavroglu, K. (eds) Sciences in the Universities of Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 309. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9636-1_19
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