Bonn 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 4: Integrated History and Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

AGPhil 4.3: Vortrag

Dienstag, 11. März 2025, 15:15–15:45, HS XVII

Einstein's Sanity Check: The Forgotten Paper on the Quantum Theory of Ideal Gases — •Kabir Singh Bakshi — Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh

Einstein's three papers on the quantum theory of ideal gases, his second "statistical trilogy", stand as important finger-posts for the history and philosophy of physics. First, on the more personal side, they mark a transition point in Einstein's oeuvre. The second statistical trilogy has been variously characterized as Einstein's "last decisive positive contribution to physical statistics" (Born 1969, "In Memory of Einstein") and "the end of [Einstein's] substantive contributions to the development of quantum theory" (Howard 1990, "Nicht Sein Kann was Nicht Sein Darf ..."). And second, on the more intellectual side, the second statistical trilogy, with its early development of quantum statistics, has been viewed as a harbinger of quantum mechanics, thus serving as a transition point from the old quantum theory to the new quantum mechanics (Monaldi 2019, "The Statistical Style of Reasoning").

In this paper I critically engage with the third paper in the trilogy. By going in detail through the first two and the third paper, I show the difference in aim, content, and methodology of the papers. I also argue, contra the consensus in historiographical analysis, against the claim that the third paper is best understood exclusively as Einstein's response to Ehrenfest's criticism. Instead, I claim that a fuller picture highlights the third paper as Einstein's attempt to perform a sanity-check on his new - and unintuitive - quantum theory of gases.

Keywords: einstein; quantum mechanics; bose-einstein statistics; bose; history of physics