James Beattie (1735-1803) was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a popular philosophical opponent of David Hume, and through his famous poem The Minstrel he had a lasting influence on Wordsworth and the Romantics. Beattie lived among the great literati of the time, and his wide correspondence provides a treasure trove of information about his contemporaries. For the past 200 years, our principal access to this material has been William Forbes's two-volume Life and Writings of James Beattie (1806). Useful though Forbes's work has been, it represents only the tip of the iceberg of Beattie's vast correspondence. And because Forbes was guided by his personal friendship with Beattie, he left out many of the most controversial and crucial pieces.
James Beattie (1735-1803) was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a popular philosophical opponent of David Hume, and through his famous poem The Minstrel he had a lasting influence on Wordsworth and the Romantics. Beattie lived among the great literati of the time, and his wide correspondence provides a treasure trove of information about his contemporaries. For the past 200 years, our principal access to this material has been William Forbes's two-volume Life and Writings of James Beattie (1806). Useful though Forbes's work has been, it represents only the tip of the iceberg of Beattie's vast correspondence. And because Forbes was guided by his personal friendship with Beattie, he left out many of the most controversial and crucial pieces.
When schrödinger returned from his summer holidays for the winter semester of the academic year 1925/26, he would have been quite unaware that he was on the verge of an outburst of creative activity that would change forever the world of physics. He had just reviewed and codified his personal world view and it was unlikely that his philosophical outlook would change in any revolutionary way. He had set down his belief in Vedanta and thus in Schopenhauer, through whom the Kantian a priori categories of space and time had been refurbished. During five carefree years in Switzerland, he had been insulated from both the hypocrisy of Vienna and the brutality of German politics. It would not be surprising if Swiss society, with its deep roots in economic security, had made him more conservative in other ways. His more unconventional beliefs, he kept to himself, and neither his inaugural lecture nor My World View was published at this time. Hermann Weyl once said that schrödinger ‘did his great work during a late erotic outburst in his life’. His marriage with Anny was at a high point of disagreement and tension, with constant talk of breakup and divorce. Their zürich circle provided ample opportunities for amorous adventures, and if Erwin cared to venture outside the usual academic liaisons, both Weyl and Debye were available as competent guides to the uninhibited night life of the city. Before the breakthrough The semester began on October 15, and schrödinger had his usual heavy teaching schedule, five hours a week on Theory of Electricity, two hours on Theory of Spectra, a weekly seminar for the electricity course, and the joint seminar with E.T.H., which met for two hours every fortnight. Pieter Debye suggested that Erwin should give a seminar talk on the de Broglie thesis, which had just been published in Annales de Physique .
When Schrödinger returned from his summer holidays for the winter semester of the academic year 1925/26, he would have been quite unaware that he was on the verge of an outburst of creative activity that would change forever the world of physics. He had just reviewed and codified his personal world view and it was unlikely that his philosophical outlook would change in any revolutionary way. He had set down his belief in Vedanta and thus in Schopenhauer, through whom the Kantian a priori categories of space and time had been refurbished. During five carefree years in Switzerland, he had been insulated from both the hypocrisy of Vienna and the brutality of German politics. It would not be surprising if Swiss society, with its deep roots in economic security, had made him more conservative in other ways. His more unconventional beliefs, he kept to himself, and neither his inaugural lecture nor My World View was published at this time. Hermann Weyl once said that Schrödinger ‘did his great work during a late erotic outburst in his life’. His marriage with Anny was at a high point of disagreement and tension, with constant talk of breakup and divorce. Their Zürich circle provided ample opportunities for amorous adventures, and if Erwin cared to venture outside the usual academic liaisons, both Weyl and Debye were available as competent guides to the uninhibited night life of the city. Before the breakthrough The semester began on October 15, and Schrödinger had his usual heavy teaching schedule, five hours a week on Theory of Electricity, two hours on Theory of Spectra, a weekly seminar for the electricity course, and the joint seminar with E.T.H., which met for two hours every fortnight. Pieter Debye suggested that Erwin should give a seminar talk on the de Broglie thesis, which had just been published in Annales de Physique .
Last year was the centenary of T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most influential of 20th-century poets writing in English. That Eliot pursued careers in publishing and banking in addition to his literary work is widely known, but many of his readers will be astonished to learn of the discovery last year of manuscripts that suggest he might at one time have been a student of physics. Published here for the first time, the poems are strongly influenced by the quantum theory that was growing vigorously when Eliot was a young man. They exhibit unmistakable echoes of “The Waste Land,” “Four Quartets” and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. (They also show remarkable physical prescience: Several of the ideas hinted at postdate Eliot's death in 1965.)
Abstract Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) was hailed as a mathematical and scientific genius from the beginning of his student years in Vienna. He was one of the small band of theoretical physicists who wrought a revolution in the perception of matter and the Universe in the years just before and after the First World War. Schrodinger’s most celebrated monument is the invention of wave mechanics, a description of the behaviour of fundamental particles, which he, with others, later showed to be the obverse of quantum mechanics. In 1927, he was elected, as successor to Max Planck, to a professorial chair at Berlin University, then the Mecca of theoretical physics. There he became closely associated with Albert Einstein, a friendship that endured intermittently, though with stormy vicissitudes, until a few years before Einstein’s death in 1955.
The idea to organize a central-european workshop on quantum optics goes back to the activity of prof. V. Buzžek (Bratislava) and prof. J. Janszky (Budapest). The first meetings were held in Budapest and Bratislava and started a tradition bringing together people working on problems related to quantum optics. Later workshops have been held at Budmerice (Slovakia), Balaton (Hungary), Olomouc and Prague (Czech republic). The already eighth central-european workshop found his way back to Prague and was organized in cooperation with the Doppler Institute and the Department of Physics of the Faculty for Nuclear Science and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The contributions of the participants focus on problems in quantum communication, quantum information, quantum state reconstruction, atom optics and nonlinear quantum optics. The success of the workshop was enabled by the kind cooperation of all the participants during the conference. The present collection of contributions gives a good review of topics presented. We hope that the present issue will be able to transfer the constructive and stimulating atmosphere of the workshop to the readership. I would like to thank the editor prof. D. Lüst and co-editor prof. W. P. Schleich for opening up the possibility to publish the proceedings of the workshop in the Fortschritte der Physik. It surely helps to enlarge the readership of the proceedings and promotes the idea of the central-european workshop among colleagues around the world.