Physics and Astronomy Calendar

In October 1924, The Physical Review, a relatively minor journal at the time, published a remarkable two-part paper by a young assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, John H. Van Vleck. Van Vleck used Bohr's correspondence principle and Einstein's 1916 quantum theory of radiation to find quantum analogues of classical expressions for the emission, absorption, and dispersion of radiation. Van Vleck's paper is much clearer than the famous 1925 paper by Kramers and Heisenberg on dispersion theory, which covers similar terrain and is widely credited to have led directly to Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics a few months later. Van Vleck's paper is thus extremely valuable to historians trying to reconstruct the genesis of matrix mechanics. It also suggests that matrix mechanics just might have been invented right here in Minnesota!

For additional information, see http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002818/