Abstract
HAVING had the opportunity of reading this interesting letter by Mr. Goudsmit and Mr. Uhlenbeck, I am glad to add a few words which may be regarded as an addition to my article on atomic theory and mechanics, which was published as a supplement to NATURE of December 5, 1925. As stated there, the attempts which have been made to account for the properties of the elements by applying the quantum theory to the nuclear atom have met with serious difficulties in the finer structure of spectra and the related problems. In my article expression was given to the view that these difficulties were inherently connected with the limited possibility of representing the stationary states of the atom by a mechanical model. The situation seems, however, to be somewhat altered by the introduction of the hypothesis of the spinning electron which, in spite of the incompleteness of the conclusions that can be derived from models, promises to be a very welcome supplement to our ideas of atomic structure. In fact, as Mr. Goudsmit and Mr. Uhlenbeck have described in their letter, this hypothesis throws new light on many of the difficulties which have puzzled the workers in this field during the last few years. Indeed, it opens up a very hopeful prospect of our being able to account more extensively for the properties of elements by means of mechanical models, at least in the qualitative way characteristic of applications of the correspondence principle. This possibility must be the more welcomed at the present time, when the prospect is held out of a quantitative treatment of atomic problems by the new quantum mechanics initiated by the work of Heisenberg, which aims at a precise formulation of the correspondence between classical mechanics and the quantum theory.
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BOHR, N. Spinning Electrons and the Structure of Spectra. Nature 117, 265 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/117265a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/117265a0
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