Jena 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 3: Session 2

GP 3.3: Vortrag

Montag, 25. Februar 2013, 17:15–17:45, HS 7

Transferring and Practicing the Correspondence Principle in the Old Quantum Theory: Franck, Hund and the Ramsauer effect — •Martin Jähnert — MPIWG, Berlin

In 1922 Niels Bohr wrote a letter to Arnold Sommerfeld complaining that: "[i]n the last years my attempts to develop the principles of quantum theory were met with very little understanding." Looking for the correspondence idea in publications, one finds that the principle was indeed hardly applied by physicists outside of Copenhagen. Only by 1922 physicists from wider research networks of quantum theory started to transfer the principle into their research fields, often far removed from its initial realm of atomic spectroscopy. How and why did physicists suddenly become interested in the idea that Bohr*s writings had been promoting since 1918? How was the correspondence principle transferred to these fields and how did its transfer affect these fields and likewise the correspondence principle itself? To discuss these questions, my talk focuses on the work of James Franck and Friedrich Hund on the Ramsauer effect in 1922 and follows the interrelation of the developing understanding of a newly found effect and the adaptation of the correspondence idea in a new conceptual and sociological context.