Adventures of a Theoretical Physicist, Part II: America

This second part of my interview with Andor Frenkel focuses on my life and work in America. After arriving in New York in March 1941 and visiting relatives and friends in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, my friend Edward Teller, who had a professorship at George Washington University, invited me to his home in Arlington,Virginia, where I stayed until June while he attempted to locate a position for me. Eventually, John Clarke Slater, Head of the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), offered me a one-year instructorship beginning in the fall of 1941, which evolved into an assistant professorship in 1945, an associate professorship in 1948, and a full professorship in 1960. During these years, I established close friendships at MIT with Herman Feshbach, Philip Morrison,Victor Weisskopf, and other colleagues, and pursued productive researches with my graduate students. I developed a new course on thermodynamics in 1941 based on my notes of Max Born’s lectures at the University of Göttingen in 1929, Lev Landau and Evgenii Lifshitz’s book, Statistical Physics of 1938, and Slater’s book, Introduction to Chemical Physics of 1939, which I revised and refined over the following years. In 1966 I published my book, Generalized Thermodynamics. I also reflected on the role that my two-fluid theory of 1938 played in clarifying superfluidity, as well as on my relations with Lev Landau and Fritz London, and on their controversial relations with each other. In 1947 I widened Landau’s phenomenological theory of phase transitions to include mathematical singularities. Subsequently, I concentrated more and more on the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, a first result being an unpublished manuscript of 1950, which I reproduce in the Appendix. In later decades, both before and after my retirement from MIT in 1973, my concern with the foundation of quantum mechanics continued unabated.

The first part of this interview, covering my life and work in Europe, appeared in the previous issue.