1926, Antithesis: Wave Mechanics

The fruit of the peace of Locarno, the new quantum mechanics, is at this point still not ripe. Hard, sour, and completely inedible. A partial birth. Everything is far too abstract. The Göttingen theorists around Werner Heisenberg have to hear that, and Paul Dirac also hears it in Cambridge. So what needs to be done to convince the critics? It’s very simple: With your theory, you calculate the most famous and experimentally most accurately measured spectrum in the quantum world: the line spectrum of the hydrogen atom, described by the so-called Balmer formula, which reflects the distances between these lines in the spectrum. Anyone who can conjure up the Balmer formula from their formalism will make their theory truly credible and should immediately win over a number of skeptics. That’s what Paul Dirac thinks in Cambridge, that’s what Wolfgang Pauli thinks in Hamburg. And both of them go to work individually and cross the finish line almost at the same time. On January 22nd, 1926, Paul Dirac delivered his essay “Quantum Mechanics and a Preliminary Investigation of the Hydrogen Atom,” but on January 17th Wolfgang Pauli submitted his article: “On the hydrogen spectrum from the standpoint of the new quantum mechanics.” Again Dirac had come in second.