A Peripheral Centre. Early Quantum Physics at Cambridge

Abstract

The history of quantum physics and early quantum mechanics took place mainly in Germany and Copenhagen. British institutions were slow in understanding and accepting the radical transformations involved in the new theory. In this paper I discuss the ways in which quantum physics was slowly incorporated in the University of Cambridge, with an emphasis on the pedagogical and research practices in the old university. For an older generation, the problem with quantum theory was its distance from what true physics was and had to be: a set of mechanical and dynamical models grounded on the mathematics of the continuum. A first generation of converts to the new theory, like Charles Galton Darwin, were quick to incorporate the new theory in the Cambridge syllabus, but only in continuity with the old mathematical tools. As a consequence, wave mechanics à la Schrödinger was easier to accept than the new formalisms of matrix mechanics. It was only with the work of Paul A. M. Dirac, whose initial training and career took place outside Cambridge, that the old university finally regained its relevance at the forefront of quantum theoretical physics.