![]() Sommerfeld tried especially to connect the number 8 and the number of corners of a cube.Ī new phase of my scientific life began when I met Niels Bohr personally for the first time. giving the lengths of the periods in the natural system of chemical elements, was zealously discussed in Munich, including the remark of the Swedish physicist, Rydberg, that these numbers are of the simple form 2n 2 if n takes on all integer values. The series of whole numbers 2, 8, 18, 32. ![]() Both methods, which did not appear to me irreconcilable, influenced me. Sommerfeld, however, preferred, in view of the difficulties which blocked the use of the concepts of kinematical models, a direct interpretation, as independent of models as possible, of the laws of spectra in terms of integral numbers, following, as Kepler once did in his investigation of the planetary system, an inner feeling for harmony. This was the direction which was taken by Bohr's "correspondence principle". One was an effort to bring abstract order to the new ideas by looking for a key to translate classical mechanics and electrodynamics into quantum language which would form a logical generalization of these. At that time there were two approaches to the difficult problems connected with the quantum of action. I was not spared the shock which every physicist, accustomed to the classical way of thinking, experienced when he came to know of Bohr's "basic postulate of quantum theory" for the first time. While, in school in Vienna, I had already obtained some knowledge of classical physics and the then new Einstein relativity theory, it was at the University of Munich that I was introduced by Sommerfeld to the structure of the atom - somewhat strange from the point of view of classical physics. The history of the discovery of the "exclusion principle", for which I have received the honour of the Nobel Prize award in the year 1945, goes back to my students days in Munich. We give an extract from his lecture below:. Pauli gave his Nobel Lecture on 13 December 1946 in Stockholm and he began by describing how he came to came to make the discovery. for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle. In 1945 Wolfgang Pauli was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics:.
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