Related papers: Disarming the Ultimate Historical Challenge to Sci…
The exact agreement between the Sommerfeld (1916) and Dirac (1928) results for the energy levels of the relativistic hydrogen atom (the so-called "Sommerfeld puzzle") is analyzed and extended. Werner Heisenberg called this coincidence a…
We review Bohr's atomic model and its extension by Sommerfeld from a mathematical perspective of wave mechanics. The derivation of quantization rules and energy levels is revisited using semiclassical methods. Sommerfeld-type integrals are…
The Born-Infeld form of the hydrogen atom has a spectrum that can be used to determine the physical viability of the theory, and place an experimentally relevant bound on the single parameter found in it. We compute this spectrum using the…
The old quantum theory of Bohr and Sommerfeld was abandonned for the wrong reason. Its contradictions were caused not by the orbit concept but by a mental barrier--the inconceivability that an electron might collide with the atomic nucleus.…
Recently it was shown that classical "relativistic" particle dynamics was implicit in physics going back to Maxwell. The demonstration utilized a simple modification of a 1906 thought experiment by which Einstein established the mass…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…
Historically, Ehrenfest's theorem (1927) is the first one which shows that classical physics can emerge from quantum physics as a kind of approximation. We recall the theorem in its original form. Next, we highlight its generalizations to…
Three out of four complex components of the Dirac spinor can be algebraically eliminated from the Dirac equation (if some linear combination of electromagnetic fields does not vanish), yielding a partial differential equation of the fourth…
Credible reasons are presented to reveal that many of the lingering century old enigmas, surrounding the behavior of at least an individual quantum particle, can be comprehended in terms of an objectively real specific wave function. This…
According to Dirac, fundamental laws of Classical Mechanics should be recovered by means of an "appropriate limit" of Quantum Mechanics. In the same spirit it is reasonable to enquire about the fundamental geometric structures of Classical…
The explanation of the first-order Stark effect in hydrogen by Epstein and Schwarzschild in 1916 was seen as a great success for the old quantum theory. Yet, it also revealed some serious limitations of the theory. To recover the…
The problem of axiomatization of physics formulated by Hilbert as early as 1900 and known as the Sixth Problem of Hilbert is nowadays even more topical than at the moment of its formulation. Axiomatic inconsistency of classic, quantum, and…
Sommerfeld introduced the fine-structure constant into physics, while he was taking into account the relativistic effects in the theory of the hydrogen atom. Ever since, it has puzzled many scientists like Eddington, Dirac, Feynman and…
Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…
Left unnoticed for almost a century, 1916 Sommerfeld H theory hides a van der Waals-Maxwell phase transition in the Coulomb lepton-nucleon attraction of ground state H. This classical 19th century symmetry breaking effect, important for…
Despite the unparalleled accuracy of quantum-theoretical predictions across an enormous range of phenomena, the theory's foundations are still in doubt. The theory deviates radically from classical physics, predicts counterintuitive…
Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was…
The Arnold Sommerfeld effect is an intriguing resonance capture and release series of events originally demonstrated in 1902. A single event is studied using a two degree of freedom mathematical model of a motor with imbalance mounted to…
Motivated by a generalization of Hempel's dilemma, I introduce a novel notion of empirical structure, as well as theory supervenience as a new reductive relationship between theories. One theory supervenes on another theory if the empirical…
In July 1925 Heisenberg published a paper [Z. Phys. 33, 879-893 (1925)] which ended the period of `the Old Quantum Theory' and ushered in the new era of Quantum Mechanics. This epoch-making paper is generally regarded as being difficult to…