3 Quotes & Sayings By Arnold Sommerfeld

Arnold Sommerfeld was born in Bavaria, Germany, on October 25, 1868. In 1886, at the age of 14, he became an apprentice in a firm of instrument makers in Munich. In 1891 he became a member of the Bayerische Verein für Industrielle optische Gewerbe (the Bavarian Society for Industrial Optics) and moved to Munich in 1893 to pursue a career in optics. Two years later he became a student at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, where he studied physics with Alexander Riemann and mathematics with Hermann Minkowski Read more

In 1896 he was awarded a doctorate degree for his thesis on the theory of double refraction. From 1896 to 1898, Sommerfeld worked as an assistant to Gustav Kirchhoff in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and Technology in Berlin, where he continued his research on double refraction with Kirchhoff. In 1898 Sommerfeld went to England as a physicist with the firm of Marconi Brothers in London.

There he worked on improving wireless telegraphy and invented a regenerative circuit that was used to reduce interfering signals from nearby transmitters. In 1904 Sommerfeld returned to Germany and resumed his optical research work in Munich under Max Planck's direction. He also published papers with Max Planck and Robert Bunsen on the theory of double refraction and diffraction.

In 1908 Sommerfeld accepted an appointment at Berlin University as professor of physics and director of the Institute for Radio Research (Institut für Radioforschung). At the outbreak of World War I he went back to England as an army officer assigned to develop radio telephony systems for the British army. After more than ten years' absence from Germany, Sommerfeld returned to teach at Berlin University from 1915 until his death on July 15, 1967.

It was here that his students provided him with his most important scientific contribution: quantum mechanics.

1
All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei. Arnold Sommerfeld
2
After the discovery of spectral analysis no one trained in physics could doubt the problem of the atom would be solved when physicists had learned to understand the language of spectra. So manifold was the enormous amount of material that has been accumulated in sixty years of spectroscopic research that it seemed at first beyond the possibility of disentanglement. An almost greater enlightenment has resulted from the seven years of Röntgen spectroscopy, inasmuch as it has attacked the problem of the atom at its very root, and illuminates the interior. What we are nowadays hearing of the language of spectra is a true 'music of the spheres' in order and harmony that becomes ever more perfect in spite of the manifold variety. The theory of spectral lines will bear the name of Bohr for all time. But yet another name will be permanently associated with it, that of Planck. All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei. Arnold Sommerfeld