Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 2: History of Theoretical Physics

GP 2.1: Talk

Monday, March 16, 2026, 16:15–16:45, KH 02.019

The Young Bohr on the “Statistical”: A Prelude to Quantum Indeterminacy — •Hajime Inaba — Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan — Niels Bohr Archive, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

This paper examines how and what Niels Bohr learned about the statistical approach in science during the 1900s, thereby illuminating his intellectual development during his student days. Despite the innovative work of James Clerk Maxwell and Josiah Willard Gibbs in the late nineteenth century, the word “statistical” still seems to have sounded peculiar in the context of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Bohr enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1903, statistics, as discussed by Harald Westergaard, mainly concerned mass phenomena such as population, economy, and insurance. Theory of Observation by Thorvald Thiele, under whom Bohr studied mathematics, offered a mathematical theory of observational error illustrated by examples from population statistics. Harald Høffding, with whom Bohr had long been familiar, also discussed the relation between statistical laws and human behavior. In the context of physics, Bohr’s doctoral dissertation on the theory of electrons in metals (1911) explicitly adopted Gibbs’ theory of statistical mechanics. Bohr probably encountered it through a paper by Peter Debye, who emphasized the universality of Gibbs’ method in that it depended only on the statistical properties of the constituents. This paper thus provides a backdrop for highlighting Bohr’s later conception of the “statistical,” which came to encompass indeterminacy in quantum mechanics.

Keywords: Niels Bohr; statistics; statistical mechanics; electron theory of metals