arXiv subjects

Michel Janssen

Publications and source records attributed to Michel Janssen.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Oppie Op-ed: Reflections on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

Right before Nolan's movie was released, I gave a talk on Oppenheimer, trying to anticipate what elements of Bird and Sherwin's biography on which the movie is based would make it into the movie. In this article, written for the October 2023 edition of the newsletter of the Forum on Science and Society of the APS, I elaborate on some of the elements I missed. I used this article as the basis for a post-movie version of my talk. I corrected some errors and made some additions to this article before submitting it right before Nolan's movie is expected to clean up at the Oscars (links to recordings of the pre- and post-movie versions of my talk are included).

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Broken arrows: Hardy-Unruh chains and quantum contextuality

Hardy (1993) and Unruh (2018) constructed a family of non-maximally entangled states of pairs of particles giving rise to correlations that cannot be accounted for with a local hidden-variable theory. Rather than pointing to violations of some Bell inequality, however, they pointed to clashes with the basic rules of logic. Specifically, they constructed these states and the associated measurement settings in such a way that the outcomes will satisfy a set of two or three conditionals, which we call Hardy-Unruh chains, but not a conditional entailed by this set. Quantum mechanics avoids such broken 'if ... then ...' arrows because it cannot simultaneously assign truth values to all conditionals involved. Measurements to determine the truth value of some preclude measurements to determine the truth value of others. Hardy-Unruh chains thus nicely illustrate quantum contextuality: which variables do and do not get definite values depends on what measurements we decide to perform. We use the framework inspired by Bub (2016) and Pitowsky (1989) and developed in Janas, Cuffaro and Janssen (2022} to construct and analyze Hardy-Unruh chains in terms of fictitious bananas mimicking the behavior of spin-1/2 particles.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Einstein and the Perihelion Motion of Mercury

On November 23, 2021, the Einstein-Besso manuscript on the perihelion motion of Mercury will be auctioned at Christie's. Expected to fetch around $3M, it promises to be the most expensive scientific manuscript ever sold at auction. In this preprint, we present the parts of our forthcoming book, How Einstein Found His Field Equations. Sources and Interpretation (Springer, 2021) dealing with Einstein's attempts, in 1913 and in 1915, to account for the anomalous advance of Mercury's perihelion. In 1913, as documented in the Einstein-Besso manuscript, Einstein and his friend Michele Besso found that the Einstein-Grossmann or Entwurf (= outline or draft) theory, a preliminary version of general relativity, could only account for 18 of the 43 seconds-of-arc-per-century discrepancy between Newtonian theory and observation. In November 1915, however, putting the techniques developed in his collaboration with Besso to good use, Einstein showed that his new general theory of relativity could account for all missing 43 seconds of arc. After a brief introduction, we provide an annotated transcription of the key pages of the Einstein-Besso manuscript and an annotated new translation of the November 1915 perihelion paper.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2021

Putting probabilities first. How Hilbert space generates and constrains them

We use Bub's (2016) correlation arrays and Pitowksy's (1989b) correlation polytopes to analyze an experimental setup due to Mermin (1981) for measurements on the singlet state of a pair of spin-$\frac12$ particles. The class of correlations allowed by quantum mechanics in this setup is represented by an elliptope inscribed in a non-signaling cube. The class of correlations allowed by local hidden-variable theories is represented by a tetrahedron inscribed in this elliptope. We extend this analysis to pairs of particles of arbitrary spin. The class of correlations allowed by quantum mechanics is still represented by the elliptope; the subclass of those allowed by local hidden-variable theories by polyhedra with increasing numbers of vertices and facets that get closer and closer to the elliptope. We use these results to advocate for an interpretation of quantum mechanics like Bub's. Probabilities and expectation values are primary in this interpretation. They are determined by inner products of vectors in Hilbert space. Such vectors do not themselves represent what is real in the quantum world. They encode families of probability distributions over values of different sets of observables. As in classical theory, these values ultimately represent what is real in the quantum world. Hilbert space puts constraints on possible combinations of such values, just as Minkowski space-time puts constraints on possible spatio-temporal constellations of events. Illustrating how generic such constraints are, the equation for the elliptope derived in this paper is a general constraint on correlation coefficients that can be found in older literature on statistics and probability theory. Yule (1896) already stated the constraint. De Finetti (1937) already gave it a geometrical interpretation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Quantization Conditions, 1900-1927

We trace the evolution of quantization conditions from Planck's introduction of a new fundamental constant (h) in his treatment of blackbody radiation in 1900 to Heisenberg's interpretation of the commutation relations of modern quantum mechanics in terms of his uncertainty principle in 1927.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2018

Introduction to Volume 15 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. The Berlin Years: Writings and Correspondence June 1925 - May 1927

This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schrödinger - supplanted the earlier quantum theory. The almost one hundred writings by Einstein, of which a third have never been published, and the more than thirteen hundred letters show Einstein's immense productivity and hectic pace of life. Einstein quickly grasps the conceptual peculiarities involved in the new quantum mechanics, such as the difference between Schrödinger's wave function and a field defined in spacetime, or the emerging statistical interpretation of both matrix and wave mechanics. Inspired by correspondence with G. Y. Rainich, he investigates with Jakob Grommer the problem of motion in general relativity, hoping for a hint at a new avenue to unified field theory. Einstein falls victim to scientific fraud when, in a collaboration with E. Rupp, he becomes convinced that the latter's experiments, aimed at deciding whether excited atoms emit light instantaneously (in quanta) or in a finite time (in waves), confirm a wave-theoretic explanation. While it was known that the teenage Einstein had been romantically involved with Marie Winteler in 1895, newly discovered documents reveal that his love for Marie was rekindled in 1909-10 while he was still married to Mileva Marić. The 1925 Locarno Treaties renew Einstein's optimism in European reconciliation. He backs the `International manifesto against compulsory military service' and continues his participation in the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. He remains intensely committed to the shaping of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, although his enthusiasm for this cause is sorely tested.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2014

The trouble with orbits: the Stark effect in the old and the new quantum theory

The old quantum theory and Schrödinger's wave mechanics (and other forms of quantum mechanics) give the same results for the line splittings in the first-order Stark effect in hydrogen, the leading terms in the splitting of the spectral lines emitted by a hydrogen atom in an external electric field. We examine the account of the effect in the old quantum theory, which was hailed as a major success of that theory, from the point of view of wave mechanics. First, we show how the new quantum mechanics solves a fundamental problem one runs into in the old quantum theory with the Stark effect. It turns out that, even without an external field, it depends on the coordinates in which the quantum conditions are imposed which electron orbits are allowed in a hydrogen atom. The allowed energy levels and hence the line splittings are independent of the coordinates used but the size and eccentricity of the orbits are not. In the new quantum theory, this worrisome non-uniqueness of orbits turns into the perfectly innocuous non-uniqueness of bases in Hilbert space. Second, we review how the so-called WKB (Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin) approximation method for solving the Schrödinger equation reproduces the quantum conditions of the old quantum theory amended by some additional half-integer terms. These extra terms remove the need for some arbitrary extra restrictions on the allowed orbits that the old quantum theory required over and above the basic quantum conditions

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2014

The Stark effect in the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory and in Schrödinger's wave mechanics

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 experimentally found line splittings, one had to make some arbitrary assumptions in addition to the basic quantum conditions to rule out certain orbits. The calculation of intensities of lines on the basis of Bohr's correspondence principle likewise required arbitrary additional assumptions. Finally, the actual orbits predicted by the old quantum theory depend on the coordinates chosen to impose the quantum conditions. Both Sommerfeld and Epstein recognized this problem but offered no solution for it. All these problems were solved in 1926 when Schrödinger and Epstein explained the Stark effect on the basis of the new wave mechanics. The calculations in the two theories are similar. In particular, both the Schrödinger equation in the new theory and the Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the old theory are separated in parabolic coordinates. The new quantum mechanics determines all allowed states and transitions without any additional assumptions. It also replaced the ambiguous guidelines based on the correspondence principle for calculating intensities by the straightforward prescription that intensities are given by the squares of the matrix elements of position, leading to results that agreed much better with the experimental data. Finally, the embarrassing non-uniqueness of orbits in the old quantum theory turned into the innocuous non-uniqueness of bases of eigenfunctions in wave mechanics. To this day, the Stark effect is remembered as one of the few qualified successes of the old quantum theory. We suspect that this is largely because after 1926 it became just one of the many unqualified successes of the new quantum theory.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2012

(Never) Mind your p's and q's: Von Neumann versus Jordan on the Foundations of Quantum Theory

In two papers entitled "On a new foundation [Neue Begründung] of quantum mechanics," Pascual Jordan (1927b,g) presented his version of what came to be known as the Dirac-Jordan statistical transformation theory. As an alternative that avoids the mathematical difficulties facing the approach of Jordan and Paul A. M. Dirac (1927), John von Neumann (1927a) developed the modern Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we focus on Jordan and von Neumann. Central to the formalisms of both are expressions for conditional probabilities of finding some value for one quantity given the value of another. Beyond that Jordan and von Neumann had very different views about the appropriate formulation of problems in quantum mechanics. For Jordan, unable to let go of the analogy to classical mechanics, the solution of such problems required the identication of sets of canonically conjugate variables, i.e., p's and q's. For von Neumann, not constrained by the analogy to classical mechanics, it required only the identication of a maximal set of commuting operators with simultaneous eigenstates. He had no need for p's and q's. Jordan and von Neumann also stated the characteristic new rules for probabilities in quantum mechanics somewhat differently. Jordan (1927b) was the first to state those rules in full generality. Von Neumann (1927a) rephrased them and, in a subsequent paper (von Neumann, 1927b), sought to derive them from more basic considerations. In this paper we reconstruct the central arguments of these 1927 papers by Jordan and von Neumann and of a paper on Jordan's approach by Hilbert, von Neumann, and Nordheim (1928). We highlight those elements in these papers that bring out the gradual loosening of the ties between the new quantum formalism and classical mechanics.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2012

Kuhn Losses Regained: Van Vleck from Spectra to Susceptibilities

We follow the trajectory of John H. Van Vleck from his 1926 Bulletin for the National Research Council (NRC) on the old quantum theory to his 1932 book, The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities. We highlight the continuity of formalism and technique in the transition from dealing with spectra in the old quantum theory to dealing with susceptibilities in the new quantum mechanics. Our main focus is on the checkered history of a numerical factor in the Langevin-Debye formula for the electric susceptibility of gases. Classical theory predicts that this factor is equal to 1/3. The old quantum theory predicted values up to 14 times higher. Van Vleck showed that quantum mechanics does away with this "wonderful nonsense" (as Van Vleck called it) and restores the classical value 1/3. The Langevin-Debye formula thus provides an instructive example of a Kuhn loss in one paradigm shift that was regained in the next. In accordance with Kuhn's expectation that textbooks sweep Kuhn losses under the rug, Van Vleck did not mention this particular Kuhn loss anywhere in his 1926 NRC Bulletin (though he prominently did flag a Kuhn loss in dispersion theory that had recently been regained). Contrary to Kuhn's expectations, however, he put the regained Kuhn loss in susceptibility theory to good pedagogical use in his 1932 book. Kuhn claimed that textbooks must suppress, truncate, and/or distort the prehistory of their subject matter if they are to inculcate the exemplars of the new paradigm in their readers. This claim is not borne out in this case. Because of the continuity of formalism and technique that we draw attention to that Van Vleck could achieve his pedagogical objectives in his 1932 book even though he devoted about a third of it to the treatment of susceptibilities in classical theory and the old quantum theory in a way that matches the historical record reasonably well.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2007

Pascual Jordan's resolution of the conundrum of the wave-particle duality of light

In 1909, Einstein derived a formula for the mean square energy fluctuation in black-body radiation. This formula is the sum of a wave term and a particle term. In a key contribution to the 1925 Dreimaennerarbeit with Born and Heisenberg, Jordan showed that one recovers both terms in a simple model of quantized waves. So the two terms do not require separate mechanisms but arise from a single consistent dynamical framework. Several authors have argued that various infinities invalidate Jordan's conclusions. In this paper, we defend Jordan's argument against such criticism. In particular, we note that the fluctuation in a narrow frequency range, which is what Jordan calculated, is perfectly finite. We also note, however, that Jordan's argument is incomplete. In modern terms, Jordan calculated the quantum uncertainty in the energy of a subsystem in an energy eigenstate of the whole system, whereas the thermal fluctuation is the average of this quantity over an ensemble of such states. Still, our overall conclusion is that Jordan's argument is basically sound and that he deserves credit for resolving a major conundrum in the development of quantum physics.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2006

On the verge of Umdeutung in Minnesota: Van Vleck and the correspondence principle (Part One)

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.

physics.hist-ph↗

arXiv2006

On the verge of Umdeutung in Minnesota: Van Vleck and the correspondence principle (Part Two)

This is the second installment of a two-part paper on developments in quantum dispersion theory leading up to Heisenberg's "Umdeutung" paper. In telling this story, we have taken a paper by John H. Van Vleck as our main guide. In this second part we present the detailed derivations on which our narrative in the first part rests. The central result that we shall derive is the Kramers dispersion formula, which played a key role in the thinking that led to Heisenberg's "Umdeutung" paper. Closely following Van Vleck's pre-Umdeutung approach, we derive classical and construct quantum formulae for the dispersion, emission, and absorption of radiation both for the special case of a charged harmonic oscillator (sec. 5) and for arbitrary non-degenerate multiply-periodic systems (sec. 6). In sec. 7, we rederive the same results using modern quantum mechanics. In sec. 8 we bring together the main conclusions of our study.

physics.hist-ph↗