Abstract
This Symposium on the Physicist’s Conception of Nature celebrates the 70th birthday of Paul Dirac. Before beginning the subject of my talk, I would like to make some remarks about ways in which Dirac has influenced me personally. The first edition of his book, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, was published in 1930. In that same year I entered the University of California at Berkeley where I majored in Chemistry. I spent the summer of 1932 at home in Los Angeles, and came across Dirac’s book on the shelves of the public library. I remember that it made a great impression on me, although I could not really understand very much of it. In part, due to its influence, I changed to Physics for graduate study, and during the years 1934 to 1938 worked with J. R. Oppenheimer on theoretical physics. Every spring, accompanied by most of his students, Oppenheimer went to Caltech in Pasadena, and around 1936 I had there the opportunity to hear a lecture by Dirac on magnetic poles. This was unfortunately not the occasion on which a member of the audience, addressing the speaker during the discussion period, was told of the difference between a question and a statement.
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References
W. E. Lamb, Jr., R. C. Retherford, Phys. Rev. 72, 241 (1947). For a fuller account, see W. E. Lamb, Jr., Rep. Progr. Phys. 14, 19 (1951).
N. M. Kroll, W. E. Lamb, Jr., Phys. Rev. 75, 388 (1949).
See J. Mehra, ‘The golden age of theoretical physics: P. A. M. Dirac’s scientific work from 1924 to 1933’ in Aspects of Quantum Theory (edited by A. Salam and E. P. Wigner ), Cambridge University Press, 1972.
See D. ter Haar, Rep. Progr. Phys. 24, 304 (1961).
See T. Y. Wu ‘On the nature of theories of irreversible processes’, Int. J. Theor. Phys 2, 325 (1969).
J. C. Helmer, ‘Maser Oscillators’, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University (1957). (Obtainable from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.) Also see W. E. Lamb, Jr., ‘Quantum mechanical amplifiers’ in Lectures in Theoretical Physics, vol. II, Boulder, Colorado, 1959 (edited by W. E. Britten and B. W. Downs ), Interscience Publishers, New York (1960).
M. O. Scully, W. E. Lamb, Jr., Phys. Rev. Letters 16, 853 (1966) and Phys. Rev. 159, 208 (1967).
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W. Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications, Vol. I, 2nd ed., John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York (1957), chapter XVII.
Y. K. Wang, Ph.D. thesis, Yale University (1971). (Obtainable from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.) Also, Y. K. Wang and W. E. Lamb, Jr., to be published in Phys. Rev.
P. Mandel, private communication.
G. E. Uhlenbeck, S. A. Goudsmit, Phys. Rev 34, 145 (1929).
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© 1973 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Lamb, W.E. (1973). Approach to Thermodynamic Equilibrium (and other Stationary States). In: Mehra, J. (eds) The Physicist’s Conception of Nature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2602-4_27
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