Heisenberg and the early days of quantum mechanics

It is appropriate in this year, when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of quantum mechanics, and during which we have been saddened by the death of one of its leading founders, Werner Heisenberg, to reminisce about the formative years of the new mechanics. At the time when the foundations of physics were being replaced with totally new concepts I was a student of physics. I sat in the colloquium audience when Peter Debye made the suggestions to Erwin Schrödinger that started him on the study of de Broglie waves and the search for their wave equation. It was from Heisenberg, as his first doctorate student, that I caught the spirit of research, and that I received the encouragement to make my own contributions.

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