There is little question, however, that the conceptual legacy of the compound nucleus model derives primarily from Bohr’s work: rather than presenting a new fundamental way of viewing nuclear reactions, the Breit-Wigner paper treated one particular instance of resonance phenomena (the capture of slow neutrons). This paper was received by the Physical Review on 15 February 1936, two weeks following Bohr’s address to the Copenhagen Academy it is doubtful whether or not Breit and Wigner were aware of Bohr’s model at the time they wrote their paper. It was an investigation of these limits which led to Weisskopf’s refined picture in the “cloudy crystal ball” model.īreit and Wigner (1936). The limits to the validity of Bohr’s assumption of independence are discussed in Blatt and Weisskopf (1952), 340 – 342. Blatt and Weisskopf (1952), 340, and Friedman and Weisskopf (1955), 139. The “resonance” terminology prevalent throughout the 1950s and early 1960s in particle physics, as Andrew Pickering explains, was imported directly from nuclear spectroscopy studies. My interest here is not to trace subtle and variegated ‘routes of transmission’ from Bohr’s 1936 address to the particle physics studies of the 1950s or of today, which would no doubt involve physicists such as Weisskopf, but rather to note the continuity of several philosophical aspects of Bohr’s work with contemporary studies.
This brief historical treatment thus relies upon a distinction I have made elsewhere between ‘historical influences’ and ‘philosophical aspects’ (cf. Weisskopf’s work with Herman Feshbach and Charles Porter in 1953–4 is often referred to as the “cloudy crystal ball” model. It was Weisskopf himself who helped to produce the refined picture which eventually replaced Bohr’s initial compound nucleus model. ost of Bohr’s conclusions about the compound nucleus, in particular its decay, remain valid today”. In remarks added to the original essay, Weisskopf explained that “Bohr’s compound-nucleus picture is more useful and applicable than the remarks at the end of this article imply. The essay is reprinted in Weisskopf (1972). Aaserud (1990) treats a similar example of Bohr’s fund-raising and political support for, yet lack of scientific involvement in, the experimental biophysics program.įriedman and Weisskopf (1955), 134. For more on the early history of particle physics, see especially Brown and Hoddeson (1983), and Brown, Dresden, and Hoddeson (1989).įor more on Bohr’s contributions to the early history of CERN, cf. Hovis and Kragh, 1991, 781.) Still, 1950 provides an easy benchmark, corresponding to the first Rochester conference. In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “elementary-particle physics” dates from 1946. This is somewhat arbitrary, since much work which was done during the 1920s and 1930s could be labeled retroactively as “particle physics”. Nearly all of these articles discuss either the adequacy of our concept of “elementary particle”, with reference to containment and Geoffrey Chew’s “bootstrap hypothesis” of the early 1960s, or methodological patterns of high-energy physics theory evaluation.įor the purposes of this historical account, I date the ‘beginning’ of particle physics as a distinct sub-discipline of physics at around 1950. Along with this attention has come some debate about how ‘new’ the problems of field theory actually are: some philosophers maintain that the philosophical puzzles of quantum field theory are the same as those already treated in analyses of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.Ī not-quite-complete list would include, e.g., Wallace (1968), Feinberg (1972), Redhead (1980), Freundlich (1980), Pickering (1982), Cushing (1983), Capek (1984), Cushing (1985), Hones (1987), Gavroglu (1988), and Hones (1991). Some of this work may be found in the pair of volumes, Brown and Harré (1988) and Saunders and Brown (1991).