Overview
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
About this book
It is now a little more than 11 years since the idea of writing a personal and scientific biography of H. A. Kramers took hold of me. A few days earlier I had been lecturing, in a course on field theory, on the renormalization proce dures of relativistic quantum field theory. Since the students had considerable trouble understanding the physical basis of the procedure, at the end of the lecture T explained that renormalization is not an exclusive quantum or relativistic procedure. A careful treatment of classical electron theory as started by Lorentz and developed in detail by Kramers also requires re normalization. The students appeared quite interested and I promised them that I would explain all this in more detail in the next lecture. I could have looked up this material in Kramers' book, but I remembered that Kramers had stressed this idea in a course I had attended in Leiden in 1938-1939. I did dig up some of these old notes and, although they were considerably less transparent than my recollection seemed to indicate, they reminded me force fully of the thrilling days I had spent in Leiden with Kramers. Kramers' deep insight and originality were apparent even when distorted by my opaque notes. The students had never heard of these ideas of Kramers' and were totally unaware of his work in field theory.
Similar content being viewed by others
Table of contents (20 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
A Remarkable Person in a Very Special Epoch
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
-
Back Matter
-
Waiting for a Revolution That Did Not Happen
-
Front Matter
-
Authors and Affiliations
Accessibility Information
PDF accessibility summary
This PDF is not accessible. It is based on scanned pages and does not support features such as screen reader compatibility or described non-text content (images, graphs etc). However, it likely supports searchable and selectable text based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Users with accessibility needs may not be able to use this content effectively. Please contact us at accessibilitysupport@springernature.com if you require assistance or an alternative format.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: H.A. Kramers Between Tradition and Revolution
Authors: M. Dresden
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4622-0
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
-
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag New York Inc. 1987
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4612-9087-2Published: 24 October 2011
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4612-4622-0Published: 06 December 2012
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXIV, 563
Topics: History of Science, Theoretical, Mathematical and Computational Physics, Physics, general