Göttingen 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SYHQ: Joint DPG and EPS History of Quantum Physics Symposium

SYHQ 3: Women in the History of Quantum Mechanics: The Project and its New Insights

SYHQ 3.2: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 31. März 2025, 16:30–17:00, Forum Wissen

Molecular WiHQP Vignettes: Hertha Sponer and Elizabeth Monroe — •Patrick Charbonneau — Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Hertha Sponer spent her early years in Göttingen, at the center of the quantum revolution. Training as an experimentalist under Peter Debye and then heading James Franck's spectroscopy labs as his assistentin uniquely positioned her to contribute to the development of quantum theory and to the emergence of molecular physics. She did so by providing novel interpretations of hitherto unexplained spectrographic data, and by suggesting new applications of the theory to diatomics. Her name has nevertheless been largely written out of scientific accounts of these years. Extant descriptions almost exclusively concern her postwar years at Duke. By that time quantum theory was well established, and her research had pivoted in other directions.

Elizabeth Monroe did not spend time in Göttingen, but trained with two scientists who did: Emmy Noether at Bryn Mawr and John E. Lennard-Jones at Cambridge. Her PhD work on computational methods for solving the electronic structure of simple diatomics followed from that influence. World War II, however, took her away from quantum mechanics. She joined John G. Kirkwood at Cornell to study hard sphere crystallization and later worked on the Manhattan project to develop implosion technology. Following the birth of her son, who suffered from a severe developmental disability, she took up public advocacy, building on her training to move research and policy forward. Others took up computational quantum chemistry.

Keywords: molecular physics; Women in the History of Quantum Physics (WiHQP); computational physics; Göttingen; spectroscopy