Wigner Not the ‘W’ in WKB
DOI: 10.1063/1.2117806
David Stevenson’s Reference Frame piece on tsunamis and earthquakes (Physics Today, June 2005, page 10 ) is excellent. However, I offer a correction and an emendation.
Although Eugene Wigner did many things, he did not cofound the WKB approximation in 1926. Physicist Gregor Wentzel did. I got that information from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which despite be-ginning with a W was also not founded by Wigner.
And in a story devoted to the link-ages between the physical and Earth sciences, it’s too bad Stevenson didn’t refer more accurately to the approximation as “WKBJ,” and thereby give due credit to geophysicist Harold Jeffreys, whose work on the subject actually preceded that of Wentzel and coworkers by three years.
More about the Authors
John Knox. (jknox@engr.uga.edu) University of Georgia, Athens, US .
