("Quantum theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations") was a breakthrough article in

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistr ...

written by

Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent serie ...

, which appeared in '' Zeitschrift für Physik'' in September 1925. Heisenberg worked on the article while recovering from hay fever on the island of

Heligoland Heligoland (; german: Helgoland, ; Heligolandic Frisian: , , Mooring Frisian: , da, Helgoland) is a small archipelago in the North Sea. A part of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein since 1890, the islands were historically possessions ...

, corresponding with

Wolfgang Pauli Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics ...

on the subject. When asked for his opinion of the manuscript, Pauli responded favorably, but Heisenberg said that he was still "very uncertain about it". In July 1925, he sent the manuscript to Max Born to review and decide whether to submit it for publication. In the article, Heisenberg tried to explain the energy levels of a one-dimensional

anharmonic oscillator In classical mechanics, anharmonicity is the deviation of a system from being a harmonic oscillator. An oscillator that is not oscillating in harmonic motion is known as an anharmonic oscillator where the system can be approximated to a harmo ...

, avoiding the concrete but unobservable representations of electron orbits by using observable parameters such as transition probabilities for quantum jumps, which necessitated using two indexes corresponding to the initial and final states. Also included was the ''Heisenberg commutator'', his law of multiplication needed to describe certain properties of atoms, whereby the product of two physical quantities did not commute. Therefore, ''PQ'' would differ from ''QP'' where, for example, ''P'' was an electron's momentum, and ''Q'' its position.

Paul Dirac Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Univer ...

, who had received a proof copy in August 1925, realized that the commutative law had not been fully developed, and he produced an algebraic formulation to express the same results in more logical form.

Historical context

The article laid the groundwork for

matrix mechanics Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925. It was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. Its account of quantum j ...

, later developed further by Born and

Pascual Jordan Ernst Pascual Jordan (; 18 October 1902 – 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matri ...

. When Born read the article, he recognized the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices. Born, with the help of his assistant and former student Pascual Jordan, began immediately to make the transcription and extension, and they submitted their results for publication; their manuscript was received for publication just 60 days after Heisenberg’s article. A follow-on article by all three authors extending the theory to multiple dimensions was submitted for publication before the end of the year.M. Born, W. Heisenberg, and P. Jordan, ''Zur Quantenmechanik II'', ''Zeitschrift für Physik'', 35, 557–615, 1925 (received November 16, 1925). nglish translation in: B. L. van der Waerden, editor, Sources of Quantum Mechanics. Dover Publications, 1968.

References

External links

Full text of the article PDF
www.psiquadrat.de. Consulted on 12 June 2021.

English abstract
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ueber quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen Historical physics publications 1925 in science 1925 documents 1925 in Germany Physics papers Works originally published in German magazines Works originally published in science and technology magazines Werner Heisenberg

Historical context

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