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 THE GOLDEN AGE
OF
THEORETICAL PHYSICS
Volume 1
 THE GOLDEN AGE
OF
THEORETICAL PHYSICS
Volume 1

Jagdish Mehra

fe World Scientific
III Singapore *New Jersey London • Hong Kong
Published by
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
P O Box 128, Farrer Road, Singapore 912805
USA office: Suite IB, 1060 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661
UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS, VOL. 1

Copyright © 2001 by Jagdish Mehra
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to
be invented, without written permission from the Publisher.

For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center,
Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from
the publisher.

ISBN 981-02-4984-5
ISBN 981-02-4342-1 (set)

Printed in Singapore by Uto-Print

 To Helmut Rechenberg,

With affection, appreciation, and friendship,

For his loyal and devoted cooperation and sustained collaboration

' Wenn die Konige bauen, haben die Karner zu tun.'' ('When kings go a-building,
wagoners have more work.')
— The Xenien of Schiller and Goethe,
No. 53, entitled ''Kant und seine Ausleger'

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
— William Blake, Jerusalem

I admire to the highest degree the achievement of the younger generation of physi-
cists which goes by the name of quantum mechanics and believe in the deep level
of truth of that theory; but I believe that the restriction to statistical laws will be
a passing one.
— Albert Einstein, in a speech on 28 June 1929 on the
acceptance of the Max Planck Medal. Quoted in
Forschungen und Fortschritte, 1929.
Contents

Volume 1

Foreword xi
A Personal Introduction xiii
1. Albert Einstein's 'First' Paper 1
2. Max Planck and the Law of Blackbody Radiation 19
3. Planck's Half-Quanta: A History of the Concept of Zero-Point Energy 56
4. Josiah Willard Gibbs and the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics 94
5. Einstein and the Foundation of Statistical Mechanics 123
6. Albert Einstein and Marian von Smoluchowski: Early History of the
Theory of Fluctuation Phenomena 153
7. The Historical Origins of the Special Theory of Relativity 210
8. The Historical Origins of the General Theory of Relativity 229
9. Albert Einstein and the Origin of Light-Quantum Theory 326
10. Niels Bohr and the Quantum Theory of the Atom 351
11. Arnold Sommerfeld and Atoms as Conditionally Periodic Systems 372
12. The Gottingen Tradition of Mathematics and Physics from Gauss to
Hilbert and Born and Franck 404
13. The Bohr Festival in Gottingen: Bohr's Wolfskehl Lectures and the
Theory of the Periodic System of Elements 459
14. Satyendra Nath Bose, Bose—Einstein Statistics, and the
Quantum Theory of an Ideal Gas 501
15. Louis de Broglie and the Phase Waves Associated with Matter 546
16. Wolfgang Pauli and the Discovery of the Exclusion Principle 571
17. The Discovery of Electron Spin 585
18. The Discovery of the Fermi-Dirac Statistics 612

Volume 2

19. Werner Heisenberg and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics 639

20. 'The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics': P.A.M. Dirac's
Scientific Work from 1924 to 1933 668
21. Erwin Schrodinger and the Rise of Wave Mechanics. I. Schrodinger's
Scientific Work Before the Creation of Wave Mechanics 706
x Contents

22. Erwin Schrodinger and the Rise of Wave Mechanics. II. The
Creation of Wave Mechanics 761
23. Erwin Schrodinger and the Rise of Wave Mechanics. III. Early
Response and Applications 803
24. Niels Bohr's Discussions with Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg,
and Erwin Schrodinger: The Origins of the Principles of Uncertainty
and Complementarity 872
25. Eugene Paul Wigner: Aspects of His Life, Work, and Personality 912
26. Lev Davidovich Landau: Some Aspects of His Life and Personality 951
27. The Origin of Quantum Field Theory 959
28. The Solvay Conferences of 1927 and 1930 and the Consistency Debate 991
29. Relativistic Electrons and Quantum Fields 1030
30. New Elementary Particles in Nuclear and Cosmic-Ray Physics 1092
31. Between Hope and Despair: Quantum Electrodynamics in the 1930s 1155
32. Universal Nuclear Forces and Yukawa's New Intermediate
Mass Particle (1933-1937) 1188
33. New Fields Describing Elementary Particles, Their Properties
and Interactions 1204
34. Energy Generation in Stars and the Origins of Nuclear Fission 1260
35. The Einstein-Bohr Debate on the Completion of Quantum Mechanics
and Its Description of Reality (1931-1936) 1274
36. The Quantum Principle: Its Interpretation and Epistemology 1319
37. The Dream of Leonardo da Vinci 1387
Foreword

The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics brings together 37 articles, which I gave
as lectures at many universities in the USA, Western Europe, Japan, and India.
The first essay reproduced here, 'Albert Einstein's "First" Paper,' was discovered
by me and brought to light for the first time; the rest of the essays deal with the
quantum and relativity theories, their extensions and applications, and cover the
period essentially from 1900 to 1940, the veritable golden age when the foundations
of most of the fundamental aspects of 20th-century physics were laid. The last
essay, entitled 'The Dream of Leonardo da Vinci,' was presented as my inaugural
lecture as UNESCO - Sir Julian Huxley Distinguished Professor of Physics and the
History of Science in Paris, France, and Trieste, Italy, and deals with the history
of man's changing vision of the universe. A number of these essays were originally
published as reports or articles over many years in journals or edited books of col-
lected articles, while the revised and enlarged versions of others have been published
in The Historical Development of Quantum Theory with Helmut Rechenberg, whose
intense, profound, and decisive collaboration and contribution I gratefully acknowl-
edge, and to whom this work on selected essays is dedicated with affection, high
esteem, and gratitude.

Houston, Texas Jagdish Mehra

14 March 2000

XI
A Personal Introduction

The great conceptual structures of atomic, kinetic and statistical physics, quan-
tum and relativity theories, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and
nuclear and elementary particle physics, ushered in the golden age of theoreti-
cal physics in the first several decades of the twentieth century. The profound
creations of physicists like Josiah Willard Gibbs (with James Clerk Maxwell and
Ludwig Boltzmann as his predecessors), Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Max Planck, Al-
bert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Arnold Sommerfeld, Louis de Broglie,
Satyendra Nath Bose, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Paul Adrien
Maurice Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger, Enrico Fermi, Lev Davidovich
Landau and Peter Kapitza (and their close scientific colleagues), Hermann Weyl,
Eugene Paul Wigner, John von Neumann, Oskar Klein, Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch,
Rudolf Peierls, Carl D. Anderson, P.M.S. Blackett, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Vic-
tor F. Weisskopf, Hideki Yukawa, Sin-itiro Tomonaga, Willis E. Lamb, Jr., Julian
Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson, and their very able successors
— such as Aage Bohr, Chen Ning Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, Murray Gell-Mann (and
Yuval Ne'eman), Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, Martinus Velt-
man and Gerard 't Hooft, and Edward Witten — not only defined the golden age
of theoretical physics but became leaders of the continuing revolution in the physics
of the twentieth century.
As a youth, after taking my bachelor's and master's degrees in physics and math-
ematics, and given my great love for literature, philosophy and history, I wanted
to become a writer. I wrote about my wish to do so to my hero, the eminent En-
glish writer Aldous Huxley, and sought his guidance. I told him that although I
felt a great urge to become a writer I had no theme to pursue. He immediately
responded: 'You have the best of themes. You have studied quantum theory, which
is the greatest revolution in human thought. Its creators are most of them still
alive, work with them and learn from them how this great field developed in the
twentieth century and write about it. Go and work with Pauli in Zurich!' Huxley,
at that time, was having a dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli (who, apart from being a
great physicist himself, had written an essay on Johannes Kepler) about the nature
of the archetype of mind and personality that makes great scientific discoveries —
a mixture of intelligence, intuition, inquisitiveness, imagination, as well as logic and
irrationality, and a combination of method and madness — one who — in the words
of the poet John Donne — 'thought with his (or her) blood,' that is, with the whole

XIII
xiv The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics

being. Fortunately, just then I received the award of a coveted fellowshop for pur-
suing higher studies and research in any university of Western Europe and — with
Huxley's recommendation — I went to see Pauli in Switzerland. Pauli was very
kind and understanding and, after the preliminaries, asked me what I wanted to
do. With my still unclearly formed ideas, I told him that one day — after learning
enough physics — I wished to write about the historical and conceptual develop-
ment of quantum theory. Pauli said that since I had a fellowship, I could work at
his institute and learn from him, but it would be very hard work; however before
deciding to stay in Zurich, I must go and meet Werner Heisenberg in Gottingen
because, as he said, 'It was, after all, Heisenberg who discovered quantum mechan-
ics.' At the physics institute in Zurich, I made the acquaintance of Otto Stern (who
was visiting Pauli) and Pauli's assistant Robert Schafroth and a new guest, Walter
Thirring, who had just come after a stay in Gottingen; Thirring urged me to stay on
in Zurich, but I followed Pauli's advice. With his introductory note to Heisenberg
about my enthusiasm, I forthwith left by train for Gottingen to meet Heisenberg —
whom I found to be very gentle, kind, cultivated and civilized. After a long conver-
sation about my personal background and interests — about science, poetry and
literature, history, philosophy and art — he also finally posed the question: 'With
your many interests, what is it that you want to do?' I told him, just as I had told
Pauli that one day — after proper training in theoretical physics — I hoped to write
about the development of quantum theory in the twentieth century. Heisenberg en-
couraged me by saying, 'This is a most worthy and worthwhile ambition for a young
man to have, and you should pursue it. But before embarking upon it, you should
work on some actual problems of theoretical physics — quantum mechanics, quan-
tum field theory, and nuclear physics [then the current interests at his Institute],
and I shall be glad to guide you as much as I can when you need help. You'll find
the atmosphere here [the Max Planck-Institut fur Physik and the great intellectual
tradition of the University of Gottingen] very stimulating. You are most welcome to
stay.' I was greatly charmed and captivated by Heisenberg — soft-spoken, gentle,
kind, perceptive, and understanding that he was. He had just celebrated his 52nd
birthday; he was world-famous and a legend, and I was a mere youth, but he was not
condescending. So I stayed on in Gottingen, and for the next almost three years —
with a handsome fellowship — I lived as a gentleman-at-large, working on the prob-
lems that Heisenberg would assign me and going for walks in the woods with him at
the edge of town, where the Institute was situated, after the seminar on quantum
field theory and tea on Thursday afternoons. I would study the original scientific
literature in the journals on the major problems of quantum theory and its appli-
cations, and would ply Heisenberg with questions. Upon my return to my digs at
the Akademische Burse, I would write detailed verbatim notes on our conversation
during the walk in the afternoon, and give him a copy of them on Monday morning
after the seminar on nuclear physics to read and edit them. Every Wednesday I
was invited for lunch at his home, and he and Mrs. Heisenberg would encourage
their children to speak English with me for practice. After lunch we would repair to
 A Personal Introduction xv

Heisenberg's study, discuss my notes, and plan the program for further study and
conversations, which, I would assiduously follow. This remained our program all the
time when Heisenberg was in town, and not traveling on business or on vacation. I
was young and forward, but very polite with a prodigious memory, and Heisenberg
was young enough to remember everything which he and his scientific colleagues
had done, and old enough to wish to talk about it, and in me he found someone
to have engaging dialogues with. In Gottingen I got to know lots of well-known
people, who either lived there or passed through to give lectures and seminars: Carl
Priedrich von Weizsacker was one of the professors at the Institute, and I spent
much time with him in conversations about physics, astrophysics, philosophy, liter-
ature, history, and art; he was truly most erudite, a veritable Renaissance man. He
and Heisenberg gave me introductions to go, meet and have interviews with many
well-known European physicists and philosophers already during my first Spring
vacation: Niels Bohr, Pascual Jordan, Friedrich Hund, Walther Gerlach, Louis de
Broglie, Irene Joliot-Curie and Frederic Joliot, Francis Perrin, Pierre Auger, Leon
Rosenfeld and Lise Meitner, as well as Romano Guardini (the well-known Catholic
philosopher), Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, and several
others, and I was able to meet and interview many of them on that occasion and
others later on. It was really a grand tour for me and I returned to Gottingen deeply
enriched. Max Born had just retired from the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy in
Edinburgh, Scotland, and come for a visit to Gottingen; he was looking for a place
to live somewhere close to Gottingen, where he was entitled to a full pension as a
former professor. During that visit he stayed for a little over two weeks in one of the
well-appointed guest-rooms in the Akademische Burse where I had my rooms, and
each morning after breakfast we used to walk to the Institute and talk about his
old times there, going back to David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, and Felix Klein.
With Born I would go on walking tours of Gottingen and its environs and see the
old, great and famous city through 'Bom's eyes and memories,' where he had spent
such a wonderful and productive time and built a great school of atomic and quan-
tum theory so many years ago. He told me many stories, and also gave me letters
of introduction for Erwin Schrodinger, James Franck, and Walter Heitler; I would
soon go to Dublin to meet Schrodinger and interview him; also in Dublin, later on,
I would make the acquaintance of John L. Synge and Cornelius Lanczos, and would
meet Franck somewhat later in the USA and again during a visit to Gottingen.
In Gottingen, I had close contact with the venerable Otto Hahn, the discoverer of
nuclear fission; he was then President of the Max Planck Gesellschaft; with Hahn
I used to ride the same bus every evening towards our respective residences which
were in the same direction; he introduced me to Lise Meitner. Among the math-
ematicians, I became close to Theodor Kaluza and Carl Ludwig Siegel, and went
to meet Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, and Andre Weil at the International
Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. Throughout this period, my program
of study, research, and focused interviews on the development of quantum physics
continued.
xvi The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics

From Gottingen, I returned to England, where I became very close to Paul Dirac
and met and had interviews with the British physicists P.M.S. Blackett, Charles
Galton Darwin, H.S.W. Massey, Norman Feather, Phillip Ivor Dee, Nicholas Kem-
mer, C.F. Powell, John Desmond Bernal, Rudolf Peierls, James Chadwick, Dennis
Sciama, and Abdus Salam, both of the latter starting their own distinguished ca-
reers, as well as M.J. Lighthill, who had attended the courses of the mathematician
G.H. Hardy with Freeman Dyson at Cambridge. I had the good fortune to develop
a lifelong contact with Nevill F. Mott, who had been appointed Cavendish Professor
when I first met him; in my first encounter with him, he asked me what I was work-
ing on and I told him, and asked him the same question; with a grin he replied,
'Young man, I have as much time for research as the Archbishop of Canterbury
has to pray!' During the following years, I would meet all the major architects of
quantum theory, other than those who had passed on and laid the foundations of
the field in which I would continue to work: Planck, Einstein (whom I could have
met if I had been able to go to Princeton earlier, as I had tried hard to do, but
he died in April 1955 when I was about to leave Gottingen for London), Ehrenfest,
Sommerfeld, Kramers, and Fermi.
From Great Britain, where I had found a great career opportunity with the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (now the Science Research Coun-
cil), I went to America, where I came into close and friendly contacts with David
Saxon, Leonard Schiff, Freeman J. Dyson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Marvin Gold-
berger, Hans A. Bethe, Eugene P. Wigner, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger,
Murray Gell-Mann, Victor F. Weisskopf, Willis E. Lamb, Jr., Polykarp Kusch,
I.I. Rabi, Richard Hofstadter, Felix Bloch, J.H. Van Vleck, George Uhlenbeck,
Samuel Goudsmit, L.H. Thomas, Y. Nambu, George Gamow, Robert Serber,
S. Mandelstam, John Bardeen, Herman Feshbach, Mark Kac, R.H. Dalitz, Gre-
gor Wentzel, S. Chandrasekhar, Edward Teller, Emilio Segre, Robert E. Marshak,
E.C. George Sudarshan, Ilya Prigogine, Charles H. Townes, Robert S. Mulliken,
Chen Ning Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, and numerous other physicists of note from whom
I learned a great deal about the development of modern physics and the part they
had and were playing in it. In the USA, especially since I lived close to Los Ange-
les, in the proximity of Hollywood Hills, where my old hero Aldous Huxley had his
home, I enjoyed very close and regular contacts with him.
Like Freeman Dyson, whom I greatly admired, I did not wish to pursue work
for a Ph.D., but at the University of California in Los Angeles it became clear to
me that for continued rise in the academic world in America it was absolutely nec-
essary to have the doctorate as the union card; in any case, I had done nothing
so important as Dyson had in his youth when he went to pursue higher studies
with Hans Bethe at Cornell, where very soon he made important discoveries. I
had maintained contacts with Wolfgang Pauli throughout since our first meeting
in Zurich, and had occasionally gone to visit and interview him. In 1958, Pauli
came to Berkeley to give lectures on the CPT theorem and on group theory, and
he was kind enough to ask me if I would come over from Los Angeles and spend
 A Personal Introduction xvii

some time with him, which I immediately accepted to do. We had a wonderful
time together; it was particularly instructive and endearing for me to be in close
company with Pauli. I mentioned to him that I had been thinking about a problem
for my doctoral thesis (on the general theory of London van der Waals forces and
the Casimir effect, with the covariant perturbation-theoretical methods of Feyn-
man and Schwinger), a problem in which Pauli was interested, and I asked him
if I could complete my degree with him; he immediately agreed and approved the
subject and the plan, so I discussed the details of my ideas with him. He thought
it would make a good thesis. After Pauli's sudden death in December of that year
— we met for the last time at the High Energy Physics Conference at Geneva that
year — I sought to wind up my affairs in California, and took a leave of absence
to complete my doctoral thesis in Switzerland, for which I received a prestigious
fellowship from a European foundation. Since I had already done most of the work,
it took me only one year to write it all up and take my degree, after which I
was invited to stay on for another year as a Senior Lecturer; I gave my lectures
in French, a language I had fallen in love with. In Switzerland, I enjoyed close
contacts and friendships with Charles P. Enz, Pauli's last assistant, Markus Fierz,
Pauli's successor at the ETH in Zurich, Res Jost, Josef M. Jauch, B.L. van der
Waerden, Ernst C.G. Stueckelberg, the old mathematician and former Hilbert col-
laborator Paul Bernays, Walter Heitler, and Leon Van Hove; I also paid visits to
Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson in Copenhagen and to H.B.G. Casimir in Eindhoven,
Holland.
After several years in California, I went on a trip around the world and visited
many countries, including Japan and India. In Japan, I had the great pleasure
of meeting and having interviews with Sin-itiro Tomonaga (whom I had already
met and had conversations with in 1953 during his visit to Gottingen) and Hideki
Yukawa and their collaborators; I would meet Yukawa again at a special conference
on particles and fields, organized by Robert Marshak in Rochester, New York, in
August 1967. In Tokyo I also met R. Kubo and Taro Kihara, experts in statistical
mechanics, for that had been my field of research with the methods of quantum
field theory. In India, I made special trips to pay my respects to C.V. Raman,
Satyendra Nath Bose (whom I had already met earlier in Paris with Homi Jehangir
Bhabha during a visit there from Gottingen), Megh Nad Saha, and D.S. Kothari.
I returned to America after visiting several countries in Europe, especially Switzer-
land, France, Germany, Italy (where I visited Edoardo Amaldi in Rome), Holland
(where I visited Casimir) and England; in each country I paid a call on my old
friends and acquaintances.
During these years my research on problems of theoretical physics (quantum
mechanics, quantum field theory and statistical mechanics) continued, and my col-
lection of interviews, notes of conversations, tapes (and their transcripts) with the
architects of quantum theory, its extensions and applications continued to grow.
I gave many lectures and wrote papers on various aspects of the development of
quantum and relativity theories and statistical physics, and my ideas and plans
xviii The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics

to write a major work on the historical and conceptual development of quantum

theory began to take firmer shape.
This brings me to a fateful encounter. In late summer 1969, while I was on an ex-
tended visit to Europe, Heisenberg invited me to stop by in Munich, where a decade
previously he had moved the Max Planck-Institut fur Physik from Gottingen. There
he told me about Helmut Rechenberg, his last doctoral student (who had done a
thesis on problems of quantum field theory), and about Rechenberg's interests in the
cultural, historical and conceptual aspects of modern physics (especially quantum
theory), and suggested that it might be profitable for him to join me for a couple
of years to become interested in my field and goals at The University of Texas at
Austin, where I then was, and do some research in elementary particle physics as
well at the Center for Particle Theory. I liked the idea, especially Heisenberg's
forceful recommendation, and the next day I met with Helmut Rechenberg; we had
a long walk and talk for several hours in the English Garden, which we continued
at dinner in an Italian restaurant in the Schwabing district of Munich. We agreed
that Rechenberg would join us in Austin, Texas, by early Spring 1970, and divide
his time equally in research on elementary particle theory and the historical de-
velopment of quantum theory. In Austin, he became thoroughly familiar with my
archives, which he assisted me in properly organizing, and became very enthusiastic
about my project. With Rechenberg I worked out a detailed outline for a major
work (in several volumes), The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, and
he assisted me in numerous projects on which I was engaged. I was still giving
many invited lectures on the historical development of modern physics in the 20th
century, but several of my friends — among them Josef M. Jauch, Ilya Prigogine,
Leon Rosenfeld and the writer C.P. Snow (who came to Austin at my invitation
to inaugurate the program I had organized at the University on 'The Public Un-
derstanding of Science,' and whom I had known and been friends with ever since
he interviewed me for my first job with the Science Research Council in London)
— insisted that I get on immediately with the writing of my major project, which
I had conceived as a youth; time passes fast, they all said, and there was none to
waste. I wound up my work in Austin, and accepted professorships at the Univer-
sity of Geneva (sponsored by J.M. Jauch) and the International Solvay Institutes in
Brussels (sponsored by Ilya Prigogine); my task would be to do research and writ-
ing on my major work. With the blessings of Heisenberg, who personally requested
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to make a special research grant to Helmut
Rechenberg, who joined me in Geneva in January 1975, and later on in Brussels, to
collaborate on a consistent major work on the historical development of quantum
theory, which got finally fully completed in six volumes (nine books), with Volume 6
reaching final completion only early in the year 2000. In 1982, the first four volumes
(five books) were published (from Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Sommerfeld to Born,
Heisenberg, Jordan and Dirac); in 1987 Volume 5 (in two parts) on Schrodinger's
work on wave mechanics appeared. After that we took a respite from this arduous
task and worked on other projects of interest to us individually and separately. In
 A Personal Introduction xix

1994 we resumed the writing of Volume 6 (in two parts), taking the historical de-
velopment of quantum theory and its extensions and applications from Fall 1926 to
Fall 1941, with an Epilogue (1942-1999). Most of the physicists whom I encoun-
tered at various times, many of whom became my close personal friends, as well
as others, have made their appearance in The Historical Development of Quantum
Theory (1900-1999). I must mention the fact that although there was no dearth
of excellent publishers wishing to publish our work, we chose Springer-Verlag New
York, who were particularly enthusiastic and offered us an open-ended contract with
no deadlines; we are grateful to them for their excellent work and cooperation in
producing this major work.
Since April 1970, my friendship, collaboration, and co-authorship with Helmut
Rechenberg has been loyal, continuous, and sustained, and together I believe that
we have accomplished a certain amount. I can truly say that the vision of my
youth, first inspired by Aldous Huxley and encouraged by Pauli, Heisenberg, and
Dirac, of writing a rigorous and detailed account of the historical and conceptual
development of quantum theory and its many extensions and applications, could
not have been achieved without the sustained collaboration and unfailing support of
Helmut Rechenberg — certainly not in the form it ultimately took; this book, The
Golden Age of Theoretical Physics is dedicated to him with my profound esteem
and gratitude for all of his dedicated support to our projects. His work on particle
physics has been a casualty of this enterprise; he has become, in his own right, a
well-known and distinguished historian of physics by his original and collaborative
contributions; his knowledge of the scientific literature and his retentive memory
are phenomenal, and together we have worked most fruitfully.
In this book, The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics, I have brought together 37
selected essays, which had originally been given as lectures at various universities
in the USA, Western Europe, Japan, and India or written as articles, and a number
of them published in their initial form by me; while the final revised and enlarged
versions of a number of them were published with Helmut Rechenberg, and proper
acknowledgment has been made in the footnotes in the beginning of each essay
where his collaboration has been decisive.

Jagdish Mehra
1
Albert Einstein's 'First' Paper*
In 1894 or 1895, the young Albert Einstein wrote an essay on 'The Investigation of the
State of Aether in Magnetic Fields.' He sent the essay, most probably his 'first' scientific
work, with a letter to his uncle Casar Koch. Both items are presented in this article
with some comments on the origins of Einstein's ideas on Special Relativity.

Albert Einstein always maintained that the trend of thinking that ultimately led
to his work 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper1 ('On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies') 1 had already begun when he was an adolescent young man. In
conversations and interviews at various times, several people sought to find out
from Einstein himself about his intellectual and scientific development in order to
fix the chronology of the conception, gestation and birth of the Special Theory of
Relativity. We know very little about Einstein as a boy and young scholar other
than what he has himself mentioned in scattered writings or told his biographers
and interviewers.
Gerald Holton, in his article 'Influences on Einstein's Early Work in Relativ-
ity Theory,' reported on his search in documents, diaries, notebooks, correspon-
dence, and unpublished manuscripts in the Einstein archives at Princeton and other
source materials for any indications relating to Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity,

During the summer semester in June 1970, I gave a series of lectures at the International Solvay
Institutes of the Universite libre de Bruxelles on the historical development of the quantum and
relativity theories. One of my auditors was a young man, Jean Ferrard, whom Professor Jean
Pelseneer introduced me to as the grandson of Madame Suzanne Koch-Gottschalk, the daughter
of Casar Koch and thus Einstein's cousin. Monsieur Ferrard arranged my meeting with Madame
Suzanne Koch-Gottschalk, during which she told me that she had a box of papers in which there
might be some Einstein documents and if I would help her in sorting them out. I was very excited
by this opportunity, and went through the papers in the box; contained in it were Einstein's
essay, discussed here, and the covering letter to his uncle. I told Madame Suzanne Gottschalk
about the importance of these documents, and asked her permission to publish them, which she
readily granted. I wrote this article and made copies of the Einstein documents I had found in
the Gottschalk family box and personally gave them to Miss Helen Dukas in Princeton in May
1970; she and O t t o Nathan, executor of the Einstein Estate, gave me permission t o publish my
article. After completing this essay, I sent a preprint of it to Freeman Dyson (as I did of all my
papers for his comments); he replied to me at once, and said among other things: 'This paper
is like the discovery of Linear B by Michael Ventris, and shows how humble are the origins of
modern science. It is an important find; publish it immediately! Freeman.' It was published in
Physikalische Blatter 27, 385 (1971) and as Report No. CPT-82; AEC-31, January 8, 1971, of the
Center for Particle Theory, The University of Texas at Austin. I have included this essay in this
volume because of its historical interest.

1
2 The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics

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The introduction t o Einstein's essay on 'The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic
Fields,' which he wrote at the age of 15 or 16 and sent to his uncle Casar Koch with a covering
letter.

concluding that 'there is no contemporaneous draft or manuscript from which one

might learn something of the genesis of the paper.' 2 Holton surveyed various books
and authors that probably might have influenced the young Einstein ever since he
came to the Aargau Cantonal School in Aarau in 1895, 3 and looked for some re-
marks or evidence that might have started Einstein's thinking on relativity. In these
and the two notebooks of lecture notes which Einstein kept at Zurich during the
period 1897 to 1900, Holton drew a blank. After a thorough and intensive search
Holton decided that August Foppl's successful book 'Einfiihrung in die Maxwellsche
Theorie der ElektrizitaV ('Introduction to Maxwell's Theory of Electricity'), first
published in 1894, 4 had a decisive influence on Einstein, that Foppl was the 'almost
forgotten teacher.' Foppl, as Holton noted, was called in 1894 to the Technische
Hochschule at Munich, where the young Einstein was then living. The suggestion is
enticing that Einstein became familiar with Foppl's book shortly after it was pub-
lished, learned from it the fundamentals of the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell
and Hertz, was influenced by it in his formative years, and was probably inspired
 Albert Einstein's 'First' Paper 3

by it to work on the theory of relativity. The headings like 'The Electrodynamics of

Moving Conductors,' 'Electromagnetic Force Induced by Movement,' and 'Relative
and Absolute Motion in Space' which occur in Foppl's book are indeed suggestive
of an influence on Einstein. We should, however, remember that these topics were
frequent enough in the scientific literature of the 1890's and the early 1900's, as
the electrodynamics of moving bodies was one of the central problems of physics.
Notation is often indicative of influence, and Einstein used Hertz' notation in his
1905 paper on relativity, not the Heaviside notation used by Foppl, indicating that
Hertz' direct influence on Einstein might have been greater than it is generally
assumed. 4a
I have recently found a 'paper' (an essay) which the young Albert Einstein
wrote in 1894 or 1895.5 He sent the essay entitled 'Uber die Untersuchung des
Aetherzustandes im magnetischen Felde' ('Concerning the Investigation of the State
of Aether in Magnetic Fields') with a covering letter to his maternal uncle, Casar
Koch, who was living in Antwerp, Belgium, at that time. 6 *
The letter to Casar Koch and the essay were assigned the date of '1894 or 1895'
by Einstein himself in 1950.7 It is quite evident from the letter that he wrote the
essay (during the year he spent in Milan) before he went to Zurich for the entrance
examination of the 'Polytechnic' [E.T.H., Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule,
Zurich — the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology].8 The essay therefore pre-
dates all source materials to which references have been made in connection with
the origins of the theory of relativity. Before presenting Einstein's letter and essay,
let us review some of the autobiographical and interview comments which are on
record; all of them dwell upon Einstein's recollection of the vague beginnings of the
'relativity problem' going back to his Aarau days.
Thus the psychologist Max Wertheimer recalled 'those wonderful days,' begin-
ning in 1916, when he questioned Einstein for hours on end alone in his study, and
heard from him the story of the 'dramatic developments which culminated in the
theory of relativity.' Wertheimer probed Einstein for the 'concrete events in his
thought,' and Einstein described to him the genesis of each equation in great and
specific detail. 9
By the time the conversations with Max Wertheimer took place, Einstein had
already completed the main edifice of his theory of gravitation and the general
theory of relativity, 10 and he could take a long look back and reminisce about a
glorious intellectual adventure. As Wertheimer recalls, 'The problem started when
Einstein was sixteen years old, a pupil in the Gymnasium (Aarau, Kantonschule).
He was not an especially good student, unless he did productive work on his own
account. This he did in physics and mathematics, and consequently he knew more
about those subjects than his classmates. It was then that the great problem really
started to trouble him. He was intensely concerned with it for seven years; from the

*I presented photocopies of these documents to Miss Helen Dukas in May 1970 for the Einstein
Archives in Princeton. I am grateful to Miss Dukas and the Executor of the Estate of Albert
Einstein, Dr. Otto Nathan, for permission to publish these items.
4 The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics

moment however that he came to question the customary concept of time, it took
him only five weeks to write his paper on relativity 'n
On 4 February 1950, in the first of several visits that he made to Einstein in
Princeton during the period 1950-1954, R.S. Shankland asked Einstein how long
he had worked on the Special Theory of Relativity before 1905. Einstein told him
that he had started on the problem at the age of 16, already as a student when he
could devote only part of his time to it, and worked on it for ten years. He made
many fruitless attempts to develop a theory consistent with the experimental facts,
but they had to be abandoned, 'until it came to me that time was suspect!' 12
Einstein, in his conversation with Shankland, commented at length on the nature
of mental processes, and emphasized that our minds do not seem to move step by
step to the solution of a problem; rather, they take a devious route. 'It is only
at the last that order seems at all possible in a problem,' said Eintein. 13 Of a
later interview on 24 October 1952, Shankland reports, 'I asked Professor Einstein
about the three famous 1905 papers [Annalen der Physik, 17, 132, 549, 891 (1905)]
and how they all appeared to come at once. He told me that the work on special
relativity "had been his life for over seven years and that this was the main thing."
However, he quickly added that the photoelectric effect paper was also the result
of five years pondering and attempts to explain Planck's quantum in more specific
terms. He gave me the distinct impression that the work on Brownian motion was
a much easier job. "A simple way to explain this came to me, and I sent it off." ' 1 4
So again it was relativity, the problem of the electrodynamics of moving bodies,
that went farthest back in his memory. Not only did Einstein have curiosity about
the workings of nature, he had also acquired some knowledge of the essentials of
physics and mathematics quite early in school. His remarks indicate that, even as
a boy of sixteen, he had recognized the intellectual challenge of some fundamental
problems of physics. 15
Excitement about natural phenomena had come to Einstein early. At the age of
4 or 5, he had received a compass from his father to play with. The sense of wonder,
of a 'secret power behind the movement of the needle,' which he experienced as a
child remained a deep and lasting memory with him. 16 The various business crises of
his father, which affected the fortunes of the family, did not destroy the atmosphere
of free thought, experience, and sense of mystery about nature in which Einstein
grew up. In 1889, at the age of 10 Albert Einstein entered the Luitpold Gymnasium
in Munich. His work at the Gymnasium was a mechanical routine; but still, at the
age of 12, he experienced the excitement and beauty of geometry when he came
across an old textbook on Euclidean plane geometry at the school.
Of his boyhood studies, Einstein recalled in his autobiographical notes: 'At
the age of 12-16 I familiarized myself with the elements of mathematics together
with the principles of differential and integral calculus. In doing so I had the good
fortune of hitting up books which were not too particular in their logical rigour, but
which made up for this by permitting the main thoughts to stand out clearly and
synoptically. This occupation was, on the whole, truly fascinating; climaxes were
 Albert Einstein's 'First' Paper 5

reached whose impression could easily compete with that of elementary geometry —
the basic idea of analytical geometry, the infinite series, the concepts of differential
and integral. I also had the good fortune to know the essential results and methods
of the entire field of the natural sciences in an excellent popular exposition, which
limited itself almost throughout to qualitative aspets ([Aaron] Bernstein's People's
Books on Natural Science, a work of 5 or 6 volumes), a work which I read with
breathless attention. I had also already studied some theoretical physics when,
at the age of 17, I entered the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich as a student of
mathematics and physics.' 17 Einstein also recalled that 'at the age of 13 I read with
enthusiasm Ludwig Biichner's Force and Matter, a book which I later found to be
rather childish in its ingenuous realism.' 18
On account of business difficulties his father left Munich in 1894 for Milan, but
Einstein stayed on in a pension to complete his studies at school. He found the
mechanical routine of his academic life at the Gymnasium intolerable, and a few
months later he joined his parents in Milan. He had left the unpleasant rigors and
discipline of the German gymnasium, but had also left the school in Munich without
a diploma. Einstein was fifteen years old.
Einstein spent a year with his parents in Milan, and during this time thought
about pursuing higher education in theoretical physics. Having no diploma from
the Gymnasium, he thought of gaining admission to the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich by taking the entrance examination. Later on, he recalled:
'As a sixteen-year-old I came to Zurich from Italy in 1895, after I had spent one
year without school and teachers in Milan with my parents. My aim was to gain ad-
mission to the Polytechnic, but it was not clear to me how I should attain this, I was
a self-willed but modest young man, who had obtained his fragmentary knowledge
of the relevant fundamentals [mainly] by self-study. Avid for deeper understand-
ing, but not very gifted in being receptive, studies did not appear to me to be an
easy task. I appeared for the entrance examination of the engineering department
with a deep-seated feeling of insecurity. Even though the examiners were patient
and understanding, the examination painfully revealed to me the gaps in my earlier
training. I thought it was only right that I failed. It was a comfort, however, that
the physicist H.F. Weber informed me that I could attend his lectures if I stayed
in Zurich. The director, Professor Albin Herzog, however, recommended me to the
Cantonal School in Aarau, from where after one year's study I was graduated. On
account of its liberal spirit and genuine sincerity, and teachers who did not lean
on external authority of any kind, this school has left on me an unforgettable im-
pression. Compared to the six years of schooling in an authoritatively run German
gymnasium I became intensely aware of how much education leading to independent
activity and individual responsibility is to be preferred to the education which relies
on drill, external authority, and ambition. Real democracy is not an empty illusion.
'During this year in Aarau came to me the question: If one follows a light beam
with the speed of light, then one would obtain a time-indepedent wave field. However,
such a thing does not exist! This was the first childish thought-experiment which had
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