Max Jammer

If Maxwell had worked between Ampère and Faraday: An historical fable with a pedagogical moral

If one drops the Faraday induction term from Maxwell’s equations, they become exactly Galilei invariant. This suggests that if Maxwell had worked between Ampere and Faraday, he could have developed this Galilei‐invariant electromagnetic theory so that Faraday’s discovery would have confronted physicists with the dilemma: give up the Galileian relativity principle for electromagnetism (ether hypothesis), or modify it (special relativity). This suggests a new pedagogical approach to electromagnetic theory, in which the displacement current and the Galileian relativity principle are introduced before the induction term is discussed.

A Consideration of the Philosophical Implications of the New Physics

A discussion of the philosophical implications of the new physics cannot confine itself to merely presenting the various aspects of the impact of modern physics on philosophical thought. But before attempting to reach a deeper understanding of our topic I have to define more exactly the subject of my discussion.

David Bohm and his work—On the occasion of his seventieth birthday

This biographical sketch of David Bohm summarizes his professional career, his relationships with Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, and other quantum theorists of his time, and discusses his published contributions to the fields of quantum mechanics, the refinement of the Schroedinger and Hamilton-Jacobi equations, the notion of hidden variables in particle observation and measure theory, and special relativity theory.

Sir Karl Popper and his philosophy of physics

The eminent mathematical physicist Sir Hermann Bondi once said: “There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said.” Indeed, many regard Sir Karl Raimund Popper the greatest philosopher of science in our generation. Much of what Popper “has said” refers to physics, but physicists, generally speaking, have little knowledge of what he has said. True, Poppers philosophy of science and, in particular, his realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics deviates considerably from the generally accepted doctrine. But as Popper, rightly I think, points out, it is precisely the proliferation of divergent theories which promotes the growth of scientific knowledge; it would be a danger for physics if physicists were dogmatically tied to a single theory or would not test their theory against alternatives. It is for this purpose that, on the occasion of the nonagenarian celebration of Poppers birthday, the present essay has been written.