Zur Quantenmechanik der Gasentartung. Offprint from: Zeitschrift für Physik, Band 44, Heft 6/7

JORDAN, Pascual

Published by Springer, Berlin, 1927

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ANTICIPATING DIRAC ON QUANTUM FIELD THEORY AND FERMI AND DIRAC ON THEIR STATISTICS . First edition, extremely rare offprint, of this important paper, in which Jordan introduces his approach to quantum field theory, independent of Dirac s, and also gives his formulation of Fermi-Dirac statistics, which he had developed earlier than both Fermi and Dirac. "Pascual Jordan is the unsung hero among the creators of quantum mechanics. Major portions of the two papers he co-authored with Born and Heisenberg that elaborated matrix mechanics, following Heisenberg s initial insight, were Jordan s contribution. Similarly, he was responsible for laying the foundations of quantum field theory" (Schweber, pp. 5-6). "Before the end of the year [1925] Jordan had submitted a single author paper. This papercontained what is nowadays known as the Fermi-Dirac statistics; however it encountered an extremely unfortunate fate after its submission because it landed on the bottom of one of Max Born s (in his role as the editor of the Zeitschrift für Physik) suitcases on the eve of an extended lecture tour to the US, where it remained for about half a year. When Born discovered this mishap, the papers of Dirac and Fermi were already in the process of being published. This paper by Jordan was never published, but he further developed its contents and this extended piece of work, Zur Quantenmechanik der Gasentartung [ On the quantum mechanics of gas degeneracy ], was published by Jordan in 1927" (Mactutor). "Jordan was the earliest and most ambitious visionary of the quantum field theory program: long before this became commonly accepted in the second half of the twentieth century, he saw in quantum field theory a unified basis for all of modern physics" (Lehner, p. 272). The present paper "already defines Jordan s program: a unified quantum field theory for matter and radiation. Particles and waves are only two different aspects of the same underlying quantum field both in the case of light and in the case of matter" (ibid., pp. 280-281). No copies in auction records. Not on OCLC. "The year 1925 was a bright start for the 22-year-old Jordan. After the submission of the joint work with Max Born on Matrix Mechanics, in which the p-q commutation relation appeared for the first time, there came the famous Dreimännerarbeit with Born and Heisenberg in November of the same year, only to conclude the year s harvest with a paper by him alone on the Pauli statistics . Jordan s manuscript contained what is nowadays known as the Fermi-Dirac statistics; however it encountered an extremely unfortunate fate after its submission … In the words of Max Born a quarter of a century later: I hate Jordan s politics, but I can never undo what I did to him … When I returned to Germany half a year later I found the paper on the bottom of my suitcase. It contained what one calls nowadays the Fermi-Dirac statistics. In the meantime it was independently discovered by Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac. But Jordan was the first " (Schroer, pp. 2-3). "The year 1927 was the most fruitful in Jordan s career … The second paper submitted in July 1927 [offered here] was inspired by Dirac s field-theoretic transcription of the quantum mechanical multi-particle configuration space for Schrödinger s formalism ( high dimensional abstract space ) to the quantization of Schrödinger waves in ordinary space. Jordan sets out to do something analog[ous] for Fermi s instead of Einstein s gas . He develops what he refers to as the Pauli-statistics (probably using material from his ill-fated 1925 manuscript which ended in Born s suitcase) and uses the quantized spacetime field formulation to compute the density fluctuations in a Fermi gas" (ibid., p. 4). "As he claimed in [the present paper, p. 480] and in a letter to Schrödinger, his occupation with the quantum theory of the ideal gas had suggested this further application of the theory of quantized waves. Jordan writes in the letter: Then your hydro. Seller Inventory # 5424

Bibliographic Details

Title: Zur Quantenmechanik der Gasentartung. ...

Publisher: Springer, Berlin

Publication Date: 1927

Edition: First edition.