# Tag Info

19

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, Wolfram's "Mathematica" uses such a version. From the Online Etymology Dictionary: "-ics in the names of sciences or disciplines (acoustics, aerobics, ...

8

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 came to the attention of physicists through the theory of rigid body rotation (classical mechanics). It was Klein who brought it to the attention of physicists. ...

8

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 neue Begründung der Quantenmechanik", using the notation on pp.816-817; with about 10 other papers published in the following few years, all in the ZfP, all ...

8

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 experiment to illustrate it, see Howard, Revisiting the Einstein-Bohr Dialogue. An objective wave function describing a particle hitting the screen after passing ...

6

The use of reduced mass in spectroscopy goes back to Bohr's planetary model of the atom. Nasri explains the context in his notes on quantum mechanics: "In 1912, Alfred Fowler showed that similar lines can be produced in a laboratory mixture of hydrogen and helium gas. Bohr noticed that they have the same spectrum of spectral lines as of hydrogen but with ...

6

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 There was a prominent write-up in an unpublished 1958 preprint with Pauli, from which Pauli withdrew his name. Heisenberg later gave a lecture Quantum Electrodynamics in the Nonlinear Spinor Theory (1966) and published a ...

5

The use of color to refer to the "color charge" characteristic of QCD is present in Gell-Mann, Fritzsch and Bardeen's original work from 1972. This terminology was apparently due to Gell-Mann: "They had actually begun exploring this possibility in their earlier paper at the Tel Aviv conference. Now, working with Bardeen, they elaborated on the idea. What ...

4

The source is Aage Petersen's article The Philosophy of Niels Bohr, published in 1963. According to N. David Mermin, in his article What's Wrong with this Quantum World, “Bohr, who took writing very seriously indeed, never published such an assertion in any of his writings, although he repeatedly refined, reformulated and often simply repeated his position ...

4

There was no need to measure the intensity directly to determine that the photoeffect is independent of it. One could vary intensity by moving the metal plate closer to or further away from the source. How intensity falls with the distance is well-known. This is what Lenard did in his 1902 experiments that prompted Einstein's 1905 work. If there was a need ...

3

Since you do not explain what $E$ and $t$ mean, I suppose that this is the equation written by M. Born and P. Jordan, Zur Quantenmechanik, Z. Phys. 34 (1925), Eq. 38, few weeks after Heisenberg published his first version of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, by 1927 it was already well-known. Development was very fast in this area.

3

Every theory requires an interpretation to be more than a linguistic or mathematical exercise. At the very minimum, it has to outline procedures connecting its constructs to something empirically observed, so-called operational or minimal interpretation. "Shut up and calculate" is a parody of such interpretation, as it also needs to provide instructions on ...

1

Thanks for all the comments. Using the paper linked by the helpful commenter (to which I found a pdf version, see here) - I could see how Planck did it (reminding me of all my old statistical mechanics in the process). Thought I'd sketch it out here to answer the OP. We want to identify the energy distribution of a blackbody. Planck conceptualised the ...

1

In the strict sense, quantum logic is a non-distributive consequence relation, not a geometry or an algebra. In this sense of quantum logic, von Neumann abandoned his interest in it (and in the Hilbert state formulation of quantum mechanics more generally), after 1936, and shifted it to type II factor algebras (which we now call von Neumann algebras). I'd ...

1

Weizsäcker did not change his mind and continued to develop "temporal logic" until 1990-s (e.g. in Zeit und Wissen, 1992). It is central to his general idea of the relationship between logic and physics inspired by Kant's idea that time is a precondition of experience of events/phenomena. Weizsäcker's views were quite distinct from then (and even now) common ...

1

As a comment (deleted since) pointed out, the source is mentioneed in in §5.4, p. 140 of Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. It is P. A. M. Dirac, Relativity quantum mechanics with an application to Compton scattering Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 1926 111, 405-423. The equation in question is among eqs. (7) (the energy operator is denoted here by $W$): ...

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