The quantization of the atom in three acts

DOI10.1002/1521-3889(200102)10:1/2%3C177::AID-ANDP177%3E3.0.CO;2-CMaRDI QIDQ2746693zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors J. S. Rigden

Publication date 2 December 2002

Published in Annalen der Physik. 8th Series (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1002/1521-3889(200102)10:1/2%3C177::aid-andp177%3E3.0.co;2-c

zbMATH Keywords

Balmer seriesBohrHeisenberghydrogen atomPauliquantum mechanicsSchrödinger

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) History of quantum theory (81-03)

Review text

The author presents the three different approaches that led to the explanation of the Balmer series of hydrogen. The first application of the quantum concept in order to resolve the problem of atomic spectra was made by Niels Bohr. Convinced that Planck's quantum was crucial to an understanding of the atom, Bohr published his model of a quantized atom in 1913. A coherent theory of the quantized atom was provided by Heisenberg in 1925. Heisenberg's mathematical formalism was embedded in the language of matrices by Born and Jordan, and with this knowledge, Pauli successfully applied the new quantum mechanics to the hydrogen atom. The third approach to the quantization of the atom was provided by Schrödinger in 1926. This version of quantum theory was called wave mechanics in order to distinguish it from Heisenberg's matrix-based formalism. The paper ends with an outlook on the relativistic quantization of the atom and especially on the contributions made by Dirac, Lamb, and Bethe.

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Cited in

(5)

• Macrocosmos/microcosmos: celestial mechanics and old quantum theory.
• At the Crossroads of Three Seemingly Divergent Approaches to Quantum Mechanics
• Balmer's equation
• Atoms, entropy, quanta: Einstein's miraculous argument of 1905
• Johann Jakob Balmer

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