Nordheim lothar (4 Ergebnisse)

Softcover. Zustand: Sehr gut. Braunschweig, Viewg 1923. 15 S. OU. Sonderabdruck aus Zeitschrift für Physik, Bd. 17, S. 316-330.- Sehr gut erhalten.

Softcover. Zustand: Gut. Bln., Springer 1927. 48 S. OU. (gebräunt, Widmung und kleiner Fleck auf Vorderumschlag). Sonderabdruck aus dem Handbuch der Physik, Bd. V, S. 43-90.

The Hague, Nijhoff, 1936. (in: Archives du Musée Teyler, Série III, Vol.8, fasc.2, p.119-133 & p.107-114). Orig.wrappers. After Lothar Nordheim fled Germany in 1934, he stayed in the Netherlands for a short time. He moved to the US, worked at Purdue University on cosmic rays, and later at Duke University. During World War II he worked as head of the department in the Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project.…

First edition. The First Axiomatization of Quantum Mechanics. First edition, very rare offprint, of the paper that is at once the first published attempt at an axiomatic foundation of quantum mechanics, David Hilbert's last publication in physics, and John von Neumann's first publication on the subject that was to occupy the remainder of his scientific life. The present copy carries, in pencil on the front wrapper, the ownership signature of Paul Peter Ewald (1888-1985): the physicist whom Hilbert had personally brought to Göttingen in 1912 to be his 'tutor in physics.' That Hilbert's own physics tutor should have retained the offprint of Hilbert's valedictory physics paper, whose protagonist was the young Hungarian who within five years would supersede it, closes a circuit of intellectual patronage across the most consequential fifteen years of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Ewald had come to Göttingen as a student of mathematics in 1906, and by 1907 was one of Hilbert's Ausarbeiter-students entrusted with taking down Hilbert's lectures and preparing fair copies for the mathematical reading room. He moved to Munich later in 1907 to work under Arnold Sommerfeld; his 1912 doctoral dissertation, on the propagation of electromagnetic waves through periodic arrays of oscillators, supplied the theoretical framework for what was about to become the most celebrated physical experiment of its decade. On a January 1912 walk through Munich's Englischer Garten, Ewald described the dissertation's results to Max von Laue, who at that moment was struggling to devise an experiment to prove that X-rays were electromagnetic waves; within weeks, von Laue, Walter Friedrich, and Paul Knipping had performed the diffraction experiment that founded modern X-ray crystallography and that won Laue the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics. Ewald's own subsequent contributions-the Ewald sphere in reciprocal space, the Ewald summation for Coulomb lattice sums, the Ewald-Oseen extinction theorem in crystal optics-are standard fixtures of condensed-matter physics and remain in daily use a century later. In the spring of 1912, with Ewald newly returned from Munich, Hilbert wrote to Sommerfeld requesting a special assistant for physics; Sommerfeld sent Ewald back, and he was received in Göttingen as Hilbert's 'physics tutor,' the designation under which the appointment would be informally remembered for the rest of his life. Hilbert's expectations of the arrangement were characteristically ambitious: Ewald recalled, in later life, Hilbert summarising his research programme to him in a single sentence-mathematics had been reformed; physics was next; chemistry would follow. Ewald returned to Munich as Sommerfeld's assistant in 1913, took the chair of theoretical physics at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart in 1921, and held it until 1937, when the Nazi legislation against Jewish academics drove him into exile-first to Queens' College Cambridge, then, from 1949, to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; he served as the founding editor-in-chief of Acta Crystallographica from 1948 to 1959 and as president of the International Union of Crystallography from 1960 to 1963, and his 1962 volume Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited for the IUCr, remains the standard first-person history of the field he had seeded on the Englischer Garten walk half a century earlier. That Ewald retained the present offprint in his working library is itself significant: the paper was not only an artefact of Hilbert's final physics course but a document in which one of Ewald's own lifelong concerns-the extension of mathematical rigour to physical theory, the programme Hilbert had first articulated to him in 1912-was being carried out by Hilbert's latest generation of students. It is an offprint that, in a sense Hilbert would have recognised, circles back to its own intellectual origin. By the time of the paper here offered, Hilbert was at the close of a forty-year career that had reshaped every bran.…