>>Dirac
was a very austere character. I would hesitate, hough, to assume that 1920s and
30s physicists uffered from the same prejudices I just described. ost of the
bundle of assumptions I just hinted at are post 2nd World War vintage.
>>
true.
however if not for Dirac, particles integral spin wouldn't have been called 'bosons'…
in fact, this entire business of knowing more than one language becomes interesting in the career of S.N Bose. Bose, and his colleague-friend M. N Saha (the nuclear physicist, "Saha ionization equation" and later enthusiast of big-dams and) started learning German and French respectively so that they could get to read the Relativity and Quantum Mechanics papers in the original…
in fact, in Bose's famous letter to Einstein from Dhaka (Bangladesh) he mentioned that he knew sufficient German to translate Einstein's Relativity papers into English*1 but is not that fluent to translate his own paper into German. Einstein, as is now famously known, translated it himself and arranged for its publication…
*1
(which
in fact he and Saha had done, a year before he was to write this letter bearing
his "classical electrodynamics-free" derivation of the Plank's Law. Bose and
Saha's translation was one of the early translations of the Relativity papers
outside Europe)
> of luxury that does not impinge favourably upon your
> professional life.
> >>
>
> wasn't Dirac in the habit of chiding Oppenheimer for
> 'wasting' his time on
> Sanskrit and poetry?
Dirac was a very austere character. I would hesitate,
though, to assume that 1920s and 30s physicists
suffered from the same prejudices I just described.
Most of the bundle of assumptions I just hinted at are
post 2nd World War vintage.
-Frank
___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
--
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
does the frog know it has a latin name?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
