Establishing Quantum Physics in Munich

Michael Eckert is a German physicist and science historian at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. He studied physics at the Technical University of Munich, graduating in 1976, and was awarded a doctorate in theoretical physics (models for the visual processes of invertebrates) at the University of Bayreuth in 1979. From 1981 to 1988, he worked at the Deutsches Museum, and from 1989 to 1995 was a lecturer at the Bayerischer Schulbuchverlag. From 1995 to 2000, he was a research associate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and since 2001 has been working at the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science at the Deutsches Museum. Eckert published a biography of Arnold Sommerfeld (and organized an exhibition about him at the Deutsches Museum), wrote a book about the Sommerfeld School of Atomic Physics and about the history of fluid mechanics, especially the school of Ludwig Prandtl, and dealt, among other things, with the history of solid-state physics and nuclear energy policy in Germany.

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Boltzmann’s Legacy.- Chapter 3. Munich Beginnings.- Chapter 4. X-rays and Quanta, 1911–1913.- Chapter 5. Extending Bohr’s Model, 1914–1919.- Chapter 6. Synergy and Competition in the Quantum Network, 1919–1925.- Chapter 7. Wave Mechanics—A Pet Subject of the Sommerfeld School, 1926–1928.- Appendix.