In the article by Gerald Holton (Physics Today, July 2000), the photograph caption on page 39, stating that Werner Heisenberg named the new physics “quantum mechanics,” is misleading.
The expression “quantum mechanics” was first used in the scientific literature by Max Born in a 1924 article in which he discussed “the formal passage from classical mechanics to a quantum mechanics.” 1
When Heisenberg wrote his famous paper 2 that laid the foundations of the new theory, he used Born’s expression; the term was common in articles by Born, Pascual Jordan, Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac that appeared immediately afterward. In particular, Born and Jordan’s paper that introduces the subject of matrix mechanics bears the title “On Quantum Mechanics.” 3
These statements are based on Bartel Leendert van der Waerden’s well-known book on the history of quantum mechanics, 4 which includes English translation of the principal works.
