The blossoming of quantum mechanics in Italy: the roots, the context and the first spreading in Italian universities (19
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THE EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL H
The blossoming of quantum mechanics in Italy: the roots, the context and the first spreading in Italian universities (1900–1947) Adele La Rana1,2,3,a and Paolo Rossi4,5,6 1
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Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California Riverside, CA 92507, USA Department of Physics of Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy INFN Section of Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy Department of Physics, University of Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy Centro Fermi, Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche “Enrico Fermi”, Piazza del Viminale 1, 00184 Rome, Italy INFN Sezione di Pisa Largo Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy Received 28 August 2020 / Accepted 6 October 2020 Published online 6 November 2020 c EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany,
part of Springer Nature, 2020 Abstract. The widespread positivist approach of physics research in Italy at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries did not provide a fertile ground for the scientific debate on the atomic structure of matter, which instead raged beyond the Alps in those same years and which gave birth, during the 1920s, to the quantum revolution. Experimental investigations in spectroscopy and radioactivity were carried out with discrete success in the 1910s and early 1920s by Italian physicists such as Antonino Lo Surdo and Rita Brunetti in Florence, stimulating an empirical knowledge of early quantum theory and the acquisition of the related laboratory skills. However, the theoretical framework necessary for the reception and development of the postulates and formalisms of quantum mechanics started to be cultivated in Italy with a delay of a few decades compared to Central European countries. The diffusion of quantum studies – with their unprecedented drive toward an integration of experiment and theory – took hold in Italy beginning from the establishment of the first theoretical physics chairs (1926) at the Universities of Rome, Florence and Milan, whose origins are here described in detail. Furthermore, the present paper presents a systematic analysis of the appearance of the quantum mechanical concepts in Italian university courses between 1927 and 1947.
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e-mail: [email protected]
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The European Physical Journal H
1 The limited reception of quantum theory in Italy until 1925 The introduction among Italian physicists of the concepts of early quantum theory (linked to the names of Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr) was greatly slowed down by some structural and cultural factors. First, physics as an academic discipline was greatly underpowered compared to the European countries most advanced in the field, i.e. England, Germany and France. The institutional status of Italian physics in the second half of the XIX century – and still for a few subsequent decades – was very weak, especially when comparing the growth rate of the Italian physicist’s community and the equipment and funding available to them wit
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