The Co-creation of Classical and Modern Physics and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

This chapter examines physicists’ uses of concepts of classical and modern after the 1911 Solvay Council. British physicists soon recognised a significant challenge to ‘classical electrodynamics’ following the work of Planck and Poincaré, which Bohr incorporated in his 1913 theory of the atom. Yet this language was contingent, and Sommerfeld and Bohr dropped it during the war. An examination of work in Germany and post-war Nobel Prizes explains their subsequent return to it, and the development of still more general concepts of classical physics. Celebrations of Planck, Einstein’s role in ‘deepening classical theory’, and the internationalisation of interest led by 1922 to the promotion of a general concept of ‘classical physics’ with quantum theory being widely identified as a central feature of ‘modern physics’. In turn, this cultural work facilitated the incorporation of a rich variety of concepts of classical theory in the subsequent development of quantum mechanics.