24
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
For Google Books you will often want to use date-restricted searches (for some reason these don't work so well after the early 1900s, at least for me), but don't restrict to a single publication year ...
- 3,552
19
votes
Why do many names of technical and scientific subjects end with "ics"?
It is not random. These names are of Greek origin, and -ic or -ics are Anglicizations of the Greek suffix -ikos, which meant "pertaining to". In other languages it can be rendered as -ika or -ica, ...
- 78.5k
18
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
A famous pirate site with a long legal history is Library Genesis (on Wikipedia you can read about its ups and downs). A trick that someone (not me, of course) might have used is to retrieve the ...
- 481
17
votes
Accepted
What did Schroedinger try to say with the cat thought experiment?
One can simply read what Schroedinger said, English translation of his paper The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics (1935) by Trimmer is available on Jstor. The cat paradox is presented as part of ...
- 78.5k
16
votes
Accepted
What equation is Stephen Hawking most noted for?
One can only speculate what Hawking will be remembered for, but according to NYT in 2002 he apparently expressed a wish to have what he saw as his biggest accomplishment engraved on his tombstone (...
- 78.5k
15
votes
Why did Einstein oppose quantum uncertainity?
I am not sure what "explain it like a story" means, but the Bohr–Einstein debates is perhaps the most dramatic story of Einstein making his dissatisfaction known. Pais's scientific biography ...
- 78.5k
15
votes
Accepted
Which physicist is this quote attributed to?
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1949), pp. 33-34:A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but ...
- 5,440
13
votes
Accepted
Did light bulb companies commission Planck to study black body radiation?
Sounds like we're all on the same page. But FWIW: In all my research for that Planck book (2015), I found no evidence that he was commissioned, contracted or paid by light bulb (or similar) companies ...
- 146
13
votes
Accepted
Why was Alain Aspect discouraged from doing his now Nobel-winning work?
The discouragement probably had to do with the stigma attached to "hidden variables" after the Einstein-Bohr debates, see Pinch, The hidden variables controversy in quantum physics for some ...
- 78.5k
12
votes
Accepted
Who was the first to say "Shut up and calculate!"?
As noted, Mermin was probably the first to utter the exact words “Shut up and calculate”. However, the equivalent rallying cry of “Get the numbers out” has its origins some decades earlier.
According ...
- 7,119
11
votes
Who introduced the "dagger"symbol as conjugate transpose in quantum mechanics?
In a now-deleted comment, Consigliere ZARF listed a number of papers published in Zeitschrift für Physik in the late 1920's that used this notation. The earliest was Pascual Jordan's 1927 "Über eine ...
- 2,707
10
votes
Accepted
Who coined the term ''Born's rule''?
I wonder why the insistence on the (English) word rule, especially as German wikipedia translates / redirects it to interpretation. Isn’t it enough for your purposes to see it stated, named and ...
- 7,779
10
votes
Accepted
What actually led Feynman to the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics?
It was Dirac's paper The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics. He gave more than just a remark about $\exp{iS/\hbar}$, he described the general structure of the path integral expression for the transition ...
- 78.5k
10
votes
Accepted
What is the original source for Einstein's description of entanglement as "Spooky Action at a Distance"?
Einstein was bothered by "action at a distance" long before the 1935 EPR paper, and it was not specific to entanglement. In his debates with Bohr at the 1927 Solvay congress he used the single slit ...
- 78.5k
10
votes
Accepted
Why didn't the phase space formulation of Quantum Mechanics get the upper hand?
This is what they call a "good question", as the expression goes. I and my collaborators had it in the mid 1990s, and about a 3rd of the audience in my colloquia ask it to themselves and me, ...
- 1,818
10
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
Depending on how far back in time you want to go, have a look at this page I put together a couple years ago: Navigating Historical Learned Societies
This covers a couple 1600s-1700s royal societies ...
- 1,466
9
votes
Why were 20th Century German scientists so impressive?
Given the historical circumstances the German education system might or might not have played a significant role in the formation of these scientists. In his collection of essays entitled "Brocas ...
- 91
9
votes
Are there any records that show how Hilbert came to "invent" or "discover" Hilbert spaces?
The notion of Hilbert space comes from Hilbert's theory of integral equations. Of course, it was partially motivated by physics, by the theory of oscillations in classical mechanics, but this theory ...
- 50.3k
9
votes
How did Stern or Gerlach, of Stern-Gerlach experiment, create individual silver atoms? How were they accelerated?
Atomic spectroscopy was very advanced 100 years ago (1920s) and we must appreciate their intelligence. If a metal like silver is being heated to the extent of boiling in high vacuum, all you get is ...
- 4,229
9
votes
Who was the scientist who first showed that helium has a bound state, and was he a nazi?
The publication in question is: Georg W. Kellner, "Die Ionisierungsspannung des Heliums nach der Schrödingerschen Theorie." Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 44, Nos. 1-2, Jul. 1927, pp. 91-109 (...
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9
votes
Why was the Greek letter psi (Ψ) chosen to represent the wave function?
Prior to Schrodinger
There is no use of the symbol by de Broglie, Schrodinger's predecessor. In the first three short notes from de Broglie on the topic of wave mechanics (1923), there is no use of ...
- 1,466
8
votes
Origin of operators in quantum mechanics
From where did the concept of operator in quantum mechanics came, historically?
This was a gradual development started by Heisenberg's insight. He invented (infinite) matrices (without any prior ...
- 50.3k
8
votes
Did light bulb companies commission Planck to study black body radiation?
After looking into more reputable sources it seems that the "commissioned by electricity companies" is a confabulation, and the "commissioned by the German Bureau of Standards" is ...
- 78.5k
8
votes
Why did Schrödinger choose a cat for his thought experiment?
Erwin Schrödinger doesn't appear to have personally owned a cat. He did however own a dog.
But even noises have their timbre, from which we may infer what is going on; and even my dog is familiar ...
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8
votes
How did $SU(2)$ came into physics?
It came to physics a bit earlier than quantum mechanics. The homomorphism
$SU(2)\to SO(3)$ was discovered by Cayley (1843), Hamilton (1847), and Klein (1875) in their pure mathematical studies,
and ...
- 50.3k
8
votes
Heisenberg's last work on a non-linear generalization of quantum mechanics?
This likely refers to Heisenberg's non-linear spinor theory of elementary particles, on which he worked from 1953 to the end of his life. There was a prominent write-up in an unpublished 1958 preprint ...
- 78.5k
8
votes
Use of eigenvalues of operators in quantum mechanics
Comments to answer: the question is hard to answer because, there is more than one question and more than a way to interpret it.
If the question is when discrete values and eigenvalues were introduced ...
- 3,997
8
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
You may look at my web page: https://www.math.purdue.edu/~eremenko/ where I collected some resources, for mathematics.
If you have an account in some university library, you can always use the ...
- 50.3k
7
votes
Accepted
Were matrix theory and functional analysis well-known to physicists before the invention of matrix mechanics?
One can probably say that the relevant parts of algebra were "known to experts", rather than "well-known", and the relevant parts of functional analysis did not exist at the time, see Moore's ...
- 78.5k
7
votes
Accepted
Stern-Gerlach: oven, or filament?
The following diagram of the original setup is from Stern's private slide collection and was included in Stern and Gerlach's 1924 paper Über die Richtungsquantelung im Magnetfeld. Annalen der Physik, ...
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