Willis Lamb Quotes

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." The Nobel Committee that year awarded half the prize to Lamb and the other half to Polykarp Kusch, who won "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron." Lamb was able to determine precisely a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom . Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. July 1913 – 15. May 2008
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Willis Lamb: 5   quotes 0   likes

Famous Willis Lamb Quotes

“In fact, there really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.”

relating his experimental confirmation of the fine structure spectrum of hydrogen, as reported by [Jagdish Mehra, The historical development of quantum theory, Springer, 2001, 0387950869, 1037]

“I liked quantum mechanics very much. The subject was hard to understand but easy to apply to a large number of interesting problems.”

W. E. Lamb, Super classical quantum mechanics: the best interpretation of non relativistic quantum mechanics, Am. J. Phys. 69, 413-422 (2001).

“In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved.”

W. E. Lamb, Sequential measurements in quantum mechanics, in Quantum Measurements and Chaos, E. R. Pike and S. Sarkar, eds. (Plenum, New York, 1987) pp. 183-193.

“Neither Dirac nor von Neumann discussed his measurements in physical terms.”

W. E. Lamb, Classical measurements on a quantum mechanical system, Nuclear Phys. B 6, 197-201 (1989).

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