SCHWEBER 11 Quantum Electrodynamics

Why this emphasis Schweber has portrayed Slater as a man who developed a deep feeling of both inferiority and competitiveness toward his European mentors and peers in the fields of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics. Slater was not alone in this reaction, as Henry James made clear. Slater, like other American physicists and chemists, used his influence in Boston, New York, and Washington circles, as well as his position within his own institution, to build up American science in an area where Americans could take a competitive lead. 107 Donnan had written Lewis in 1921 that "you are making old Europe sit up some. If it wasn t for Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, and Bragg, we should be in a bad way." 108 But it was not enough for Europeans to sit up "some" they must be made to gawk. 

See Mulliken, Life, 136 and S. S. Schweber, "Shelter Island, Pocono, and Oldstone The Emergence of American Quantum Electrodynamics after World War II," Osiris, 2d ser., 2 (1986) 265302, on 277. John Van Vleck was present (279). 

According to Primas (1991, p. 163), "the philosophical literature on reductionism is teeming with scientific nonsense," and he quotes, among others, Kemeny and Oppenheim (1956), who said "a great part of classical chemistry has been reduced to atomic physics." Perhaps it was not philosophers who invented this story after all. Almost certainly, Oppenheim and other philosophers of science at the time were familiar with the influential statements of Dirac, Heisenberg, Reichenbach, and Jordan on this issue. " Notoriously, the physicist Dirac (1929, p. 721) said, the underlying laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that exact applications of these laws lead to equations which are too complicated to be soluble." Less famously, the philosopher of science Reichenbach (1978, p. 129) reiterated that "the problem of physics and chemistry appears finally to have been resolved today it is possible to say that chemistry is part of physics, just as much as thermodynamics or the theory of electricity." These views clearly stuck. For example, in a recent review of quantum electrodynamics (QED), to which Dirac made important contributions, the historian of science Schweber (1997, p. 177) says, "the laws of physics encompass in principle the phenomena and the laws of chemistry."... 

Scerri, E.R. 2000. Editorial 4 (Experimental Display of d Orbitals). Foundations of Chemistry 2 1-4. Scerri, E.R. and McIntyre, L. 1997. The Case for the Philosophy of Chemistry. Synthese 111 213-232. Schweber, S.S. 2002. Enrico Fermi and Quantum Electrodynamics 1929-32. Physics Today (June) 31-36. Scott, W.T. 1967. Erwin Schrodinger, An Introduction to His Writings. Amherst, MA University of Massachusetts Press. 

For an interesting account of the history of quantum electrodynamics, see Schweber s QED and the Men Who Made It Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and... 

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