Polykarp Kusch (1911-1993)

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Polykarp Kusch, an accomplished physicist and Nobel laureate, born in Blankenburg, Germany on January 26, 1911. In 1912, the Kusch family moved from Germany to the United States, where Polykarp would later build his reputation as a respected and successful scientist. After concluding his pre-college education in [...]

Pauling Amidst the Titans of Quantum Mechanics: Europe, 1926

[Ed. Note: Spring 2010 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson, Jr.'s landmark textbook, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics.  This is post 1 of 4 detailing the authoring and impact of Pauling and Wilson's book.] “…the replacement of the old quantum theory by the quantum mechanics is not the [...]

Two Years on the Pauling Beat

Today marks the second anniversary of the launching of the Pauling Blog.  In two years we have generated 214 posts, garnered over 63,000 views (not counting those accruing from syndication, which WordPress doesn’t include in its total statistics) and been graced with nearly 7,400 spam comments, most of which, thankfully, have been kept at bay [...]

The Guggenheim Trip, Part III: Unexpected Colleagues

“The paper of Heitler and London on H2 for the first time seemed to provide a basic understanding, which could be extended to other molecules. Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena soon used the valence bond method. . . . As a master salesman and showman, Linus persuaded chemists all over [...]

The Guggenheim Trip, Part II: The Growth of a Scientist

“My year in Munich was very productive. I not only got a very good grasp of quantum mechanics — by attending Sommerfeld’s lectures on the subject, as well as other lectures by him and other people in the University, and also by my own study of published papers — but in addition I was able [...]

Our Newest Addition: Pauling-Goudsmit Letters

“Goudsmit and I were never together, I think, during the period when [The Structure of Line Spectra] was written. He would write a draft of some material that he thought ought to go in the book and then using that as a basis I wrote the corresponding sections of the book.” – Linus Pauling. AHQP [...]

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

“I learned mathematics from Born and physics from Bohr, and from Sommerfeld I learned optimism.” – Werner Heisenberg While the Bohr-Sommerfeld atom had proved revolutionary in the mid-1910s, a decade later the model was considered disordered and highly paradoxical. For years, researchers had tried to rebuild mathematics to fit the atomic model of the day. [...]

Linus Pauling and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics

“My year in Munich was very productive. I not only got a very good grasp of quantum mechanics — by attending Sommerfeld’s lectures on the subject, as well as other lectures by him and other people in the University, and also by my own study of published papers — but in addition I was able [...]

A Classic of Twentieth-Century Science: The Nature of the Chemical Bond

“I have just returned from a short vacation for which the only books I took were a half-dozen detective stories and your ‘Chemical Bond’. I found yours the most exciting of the lot.” – G.N. Lewis. Letter to Linus Pauling. August 25, 1939. In the fall of 1930, Pauling began work on a determination of [...]

Featured Website: Linus Pauling and the Nature of the Chemical Bond

“I consider that the field of work in which Dr. Pauling is engaged, namely the study of the chemical bond and of valence from the standpoint of modern physics, is the most important line of research in theoretical chemistry today; and I venture to believe that there is no one in the world who in [...]