Weimar Physics: Sommerfeld's seminar and the causality principle (Q2430895)

Starting from Forman's essay ``Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927'' and his analysis about the evolution of the meaning of ``causality'' Schweber gives a thorough investigation of the changes that the concept of causality underwent in this period. He focuses his considerations on the situation in Munich, in particular on the seminar of Arnold Sommerfeld. The classical concept of causality was challenged by the development of quantum mechanics in the period 1920-1927. At first Schweber sketches Sommerfeld's carrier, his early works and his contacts to Einstein as well as to the Göttingen mathematicians Klein, Hilbert and Minkowski. Owing to these contacts Sommerfeld became acquainted with the `doctrine of preestablished harmony between mathematics and physics' and shared this view. Schweber describes the shaping of this view in Göttingen's community of mathematicians and physicists in their discussions about the foundation of physical theories and especially the mathematical formulation of the relativity theory. Moreover he considers how Sommerfeld expressed the preestablished harmony in his works, how he connected it with aspects of the Pythagorean philosophy and how many of his students followed his view. Then Schweber continues by stating some universal consequences of the principle of special relativity like causality as well as the conservation of energy and momentum and argues that Einstein, Sommerfeld, Pauli, and Wentzel could not give these consequences in a constructive theory and that their adherence on to these consequences caused their critical position to the Bohr-Kramers-Slater-theory concerning light quanta and the emission and absorption of electromagnetic radiation in atomic transitions. After a closer look at that debate the reaction of the Munich physicists at Schrödinger's fundamental papers on wave mechanics as well as Born's probabilistic interpretation of Schrödinger's Psi-function that called for a new meaning of causality is analysed in detail. Finally, Schweber traces Wentzel's elucidation of the `causal' character of the quantum-mechanical description of microscopic processes by using scattering theory in two papers in 1926 and 1928 as well as the completion of this process of reformulating causality by Fermi and Racah in the following years. All in all, an interesting history is presented in readable and detailed analysis.