Über Wellen und Korpuskeln in der Quantenmechanik. Offprint presented to Kramers
Publisher Information: 1927.
Jordan, Pascual (1902-80). Über Wellen und Korpuskeln in der Quantenmechanik. Offprint from Zeitschrift für Physik 45 (1927). 766-775pp. 229 x 157 mm. Original printed wrappers, slightly toned. Very good. Presentation Copy, inscribed by Jordan to H. A. Kramers (1894-1952) on the front wrapper: “Kramers Mit vielen herzlichen Grüßen!” [Kramers with best regards].
First Edition, Offprint Issue. Jordan, the “unsung hero among the creators of quantum mechanics” (Schweber, QED and the Men who Made It, p. 5), was one of the founders of quantum electrodynamics. In 1927 Dirac had laid out the initial formulation of QED in his paper “The quantum theory of emission and absorption of radiation,” which introduced the idea of “second quantization” to reconcile the wave and light-quantum descriptions of the electromagnetic field. “Reading Dirac’s QED paper gave Jordan the insight on how to ‘second quantize’ so that the quanta obeyed the Pauli exclusion principle” (Schweber, p. 34).
For Jordan, this second quantization “was to be viewed as the quantization of a classical field. Jordan had been very much drawn to the de Broglie-Einstein-Schrödinger view that fields were the primary entities. Moreover, he believed that this procedure should be applied to matter fields in the same way as it had been applied by him to the electromagnetic field in his paper with Born (1926) and in the Dreimännerarbeit (1926) . . . In a series of seminal papers [including this one] stimulated by Dirac’s formulation, Jordan established that the ‘second quantization’ procedure could in fact be thus interpreted. These papers laid the foundation of quantum field theory” (Schweber, p. 33; emphasis ours).
Following a joint paper with Oskar Klein (“Zum Mehrkörperproblem der Quantentheorie,” 1927), Jordan published the present paper in which he formulated the quantization rules to yield Fermi-Dirac statistics. This paper “contained several other formal and mathematical generalizations, but its main practical value is that, in the newly established theory of the ‘quantized wave field,’ the fluctuations in the Bose case now satisfied all requirements following from Einstein’s light-quantum treatment of 1924 and 1925” (Mehra and Rechenberg, Historical Development of Quantum Theory, 6, p. 231).
Book Id: 46050Price: $3,500.00