Seth, Suman (Author)
Mystik and Technik: Arnold Sommerfeld and Early-Weimar Quantum Theory. In his now-classic 1971 paper on physics and Weimar culture, Paul Forman cited the case of Munich's professor of theoretical physics, Arnold Sommerfeld, as a telling example of a respected physicist's linguistic adaptation to an antagonistic cultural milieu. Hardly known for his flights of fancy, Sommerfeld began to speak - in the period after the end of the First World War - of number-mysteries and their place in quantum spectroscopy. For Forman, this was evidence of the readiness of even a Sommerfeld to flirt with the very anti-scientific tendencies he deplored. Without denying the prevalence of talk of mysticism in popular discourse during the Weimar period, this paper suggests that one should see Sommerfeld's use of the term Mystik not as mere pandering to a hostile public, but as an integral part of the practice of his theoretical physics, what he termed the craft of the quantum (die Technik der Quanten). This paper, then, examines, first, the productive place of Mystik within Technik in early-Weimar quantum-theoretical research and, second, what Sommerfeld saw as the (lesser) alternative to his own Technik, Niels Bohr's gifted intermingling of the classical and quantum worlds through his principle of correspondence.
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