Hirschfelder, Joseph

Hirschfelder, Joseph O. Curtis, Charles F. Bird, R. Byron Molecular... 

Quotation from Sommerfeld, Atomic Structures, 79. On p. vi, Sommerfeld notes that in the chapter on the natural system of the elements, "the former discussions of molecular models and atomic volumes have been thoroughly pared down." At Harvard in 1925, Edwin Kemble s course in quantum mechanics included the second edition of Sommerfeld s Aufbau, according to Schweber (1990 348). Similarly, Joseph Hirschfelder was reading it as an undergraduate at Yale according to Hirschfelder, "My Adventures in Theoretical Chemistry," Ann.Rev.P.Chem. 33 (1983) 129, on 4. 

Later reconstructing the history of this period, Coulson claimed that the development of wave mechanics from Schrodinger to Dirac came to a "full stop" about 1929 insofar as chemistry was concerned. It was one thing to deal with the simplest cases of the H2+ ion and the H2 molecule. These problems hardly were comparable to methane or benzene. "Despondency set in."46 Joseph Hirschfelder later recalled that there were many new techniques to be learned in the 1920s, but then the realization set in that although "nature might be simple and elegant, molecular problems were definitely more complicated.. .. At this point, the theoretical physicists left the chemist to wallow around with their messy molecules while they resumed their search for new fundamental laws of nature."47... 

Hans A. Bethe, Klaus Fuchs, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, John L. Magee, Rudolph E. Peierls, and John von Neumann, Blast Waves, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory Report LA-2000, Office of Technical Services, Washington, D.C., 1958, 301 pp. 

Lawrence Badash, Introduction, in Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1945. ecfited by Lawrence Badash, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, and Herbert P. Broida (Dordrecht, Holland D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980), xL... 

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