What Niels Bohr saw in Japan :the giant of quantum mechanics and his lecturetrip in 1937

Jan Faye

Peter Bokulich, Alisa Bokulich

David K. Ferry

Erwin Schrodinger begins by describing the classical system, using the Rutherford model of the atom. During 1934–1935, Schrodinger was primarily situated at Oxford, although he toured the United States during this period. During 1935, he received support from the Imperial Chemical Industries, London, which allowed him some leisure time in which to write an overview of the state of quantum mechanics as he saw it. While the period following the 1927 and 1930 Solvay conferences seemed to be relatively calm, a series of important papers would arrive in 1935. These included Schrodinger's view on the status of quantum mechanics as well as his famous thought experiment involving a cat. Schrodinger's work would be published in three parts in the German journal Die Naturwissenschaften . Schrodinger suggests that the Niels Bohr doctrine is “born of distress.” Almost all the important figures in quantum mechanics were also there—Bohr, Schrodinger, W. Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi, and both de Broglies.

Paul K. Feyerabend

L. Rosenfeld

When I was staying at Yukawa's Institute in Kyoto two years ago, I had occasion to discuss Bohr's ideas with the great Japanese physicist, whose conception of the meson with its complementary aspects of elementary particle and field of nuclear force is one of the most striking illustrations of the fruitfulness of the new way of looking at things that we owe to Niels Bohr. I asked Yukawa whether the Japanese physicists had experienced the same difficulty as their Western colleagues in assimilating the idea of complementarity and in adapting themselves to it. He answered, “No, Bohr's argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us;” and, as I expressed surprise, he added, with his aristocratic smile, “You see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle.”