2006/10/23 by Anthony Duncan, Duncan, Anthony, Michel Janssen +1
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) #Linguistic research and analysis #physics.hist-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.physics/0610192
82 pages
arxiv created 2006/10/23 · openalex publication_date 2006/10/23 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In October 1924, the Physical Review, a relatively minor journal at the time, published a remarkable two-part paper by John H. Van Vleck, working in virtual isolation at the University of Minnesota. Van Vleck combined advanced techniques of classical mechanics with Bohr's correspondence principle and Einstein's quantum theory of radiation to find quantum analogues of classical expressions for the emission, absorption, and dispersion of radiation. For modern readers Van Vleck's paper is much easier to follow than the famous paper by Kramers and Heisenberg on dispersion theory, which covers similar terrain and is widely credited to have led directly to Heisenberg's "Umdeutung" paper. This makes Van Vleck's paper extremely valuable for the reconstruction of the genesis of matrix mechanics. It also makes it tempting to ask why Van Vleck did not take the next step and develop matrix mechanics himself.