München 2019 – scientific programme

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 11: The tools of physical theory

GP 11.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 20, 2019, 14:30–15:00, HS 9

The Correspondence Principle as a Research Tool: Rethinking the Old Quantum Theory — •Martin Jähnert — TU Berlin

In a classical assessment, Max Jammer described the old quantum theory as a ``lamentable hodgepodge of hypothesis, principles, theorems and computational recipes.'' This conglomeration of theoretical tools, he diagnosed, constituted a conceptually flawed mix of classical and quantum concepts and was therefore intrinsically doomed to failure. Decades have gone by, in which the philosophy and history of science developed a much more balanced take on the role of theoretical tools in physics, yet Jammer's assessment and the associated narrative of a crisis of the old quantum theory remains largely intact.

In this talk, I will reexamine multiple approaches within the old quantum theory, which operated with a set of loosely interconnected tools while building on a shared conception of quantum systems. I will show how the transfer of these theoretical tools into new empirical domains, their integration into existing theoretical representations and their implementation changed the tools themselves. This transformation through implementation, I will argue, played a central role in the emergence of quantum mechanics and provides the basis for reassessing the old quantum theory and its development.