Mensing Lucy (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, very rare offprint, of the thesis and first publication of Lucy Mensing, woman pioneer of quantum mechanics. Lucy Mensing was born on March 11, 1901 in Hamburg, the daughter of the merchant Hermann Mensing and his wife Martha. After graduating from the St. Johannis convent school, she decided to study mathematics, physics and chemistry at the University of Hamburg, which had opened a year earlier - a remarkable step for a young woman at the time. During her studies, she turned to theoretical physics. In the winter semester of 1923/24, she completed the present paper on diatomic molecules at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. She carried out this work within the framework of the 'old quantum theory', i.e., on the basis of the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory. This area was also the subject of her doctoral thesis, which she wrote under Wilhelm Lenz in Hamburg and completed in January 1925; it dealt with the broadening of the spectral lines of atoms due to the Stark effect of the atomic or molecular fields in a gas. In 1925 Mensing moved to Göttingen to do research on matrix mechanics, which had just been formulated, under Pascual Jordan. She studied the rotational spectrum of diatomic molecules using the methods of matrix mechanics - this was the first application of the new quantum mechanics to atomic problems, after Wolfgang Pauli's calculation of the spectrum of hydrogen. As a by-product of this work, Mensing was the first to find that from the allowed integer or half-integer quantum numbers of angular momentum, only the integer ones apply for orbital angular momentum. This, together with the discovery of electron spin, was the key to understanding atomic spectra. She also published (with Pauli) the calculation of the electrical polarizability of gases from diatomic molecules with the help of matrix mechanics, and on matrix mechanics applied to the partial Paschen-Back effect, a continuation of work by Heisenberg and Jordan. Mensing published a total of seven papers before she gave up her career in physics in 1930, following the birth of her first son - she had married the physicist Wilhelm Schütz in 1928. Mensing died in 1995. Not on OCLC or RBH. 8vo (229 x 158 mm), p. 602-610. Original printed wrappers ('Mensing' underlined on front wrapper).