Werner Heisenberg had just celebrated his twentieth birthday when he presented his first paper for publication in 1921. This paper, a long and complex study entitled “On the Quantum Theory of Line Structure and of the Anomalous Zeeman Effects,” immediately placed its young author on the forefront of theoretical spectroscopy. “He understands everything,” Niels Bohr remarked. But, as often happens with brilliant first papers, its unique proposals were as controversial and perplexing as the phenomena they purported to explain. Figure 1 is a reproduction of part of the first page of this paper.
REFERENCES
1.
2.
A. Hermann, Werner Heisenberg 1901–1976 (trans, by Timothy Nevill), Inter Nationes, Bonn–Bad Godesberg (1976), page 19.
3.
N. Bohr, in Uber die Quantentheorie der Linienspektren (trans, into German by Paul Hertz), Braunschweig (1923).
4.
W. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (trans, by Arnold J. Pomerans), Harper, New York (1971), page 2 (with slight change in translation).
5.
Reference 2, page 12.
6.
7.
8.
Sommerfeld to Landé, 25 February 1921 (SHQP 4, 13).
9.
10.
11.
12.
A. Landé, Fortschritte der Quantentheorie, Dresden (1922), page 54.
13.
Heisenberg to Landé, 26 October 1921 (SHQP 6, 2).
14.
Heisenberg to Pauli, 19 November 1921 (SHQP 80).
15.
Landé to Bohr, 12 May 1922 (BSC 4, 3).
16.
Heisenberg to Landé, 28 November 1921 (SHQP 6, 2).
17.
A. Landé, personal communication, 2 August 1975.
18.
19.
Sommerfeld to Einstein, 11 January 1922, in Einstein and Sommerfeld, Briefwechsel (A. Hermann, ed.), Basel (1968), page 96.
20.
Sommerfeld to Bohr, 25 March 1922 (BSC 7, 3).
21.
Bohr to Landé, 3 March 1923 (SHQP 4, 1).
22.
23.
This content is only available via PDF.
© 1978 American Institute of Physics.
1978
American Institute of Physics
You do not currently have access to this content.
