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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 Subsequently, I concentrated more and more on the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, a first result being an unpublished manuscript of 1950, which I reproduce in the Appendix.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.

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Correspondence to Laszlo Tisza.

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Editors’ Note: Laszlo Tisza died of heart failure at the Stone Institute in Newton, Massachusetts, on April 15, 2009, at the age of 101.

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Tisza, L. Adventures of a Theoretical Physicist, Part II: America. Phys. perspect. 11, 120–168 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-008-0406-2

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Keywords:

  • Sébastien Balibar
  • John Bardeen
  • Edmond Bauer
  • Niels Bohr
  • Max Born
  • Herbert Callen
  • Constantin Carathéodory
  • Robert S. Cohen
  • Samuel Collins
  • Peter Debye
  • Albert Einstein
  • Herman Feshbach
  • Nathaniel H. Frank
  • Philipp Frank
  • Francis Friedman
  • Jacqueline Hadamard
  • Gerald Holton
  • Peter Kapitza
  • Isaak M. Khalatnikov
  • Charles Kittel
  • Thomas S. Kuhn
  • Nicholas Kurti
  • Lev Landau
  • Evgenii Lifshitz
  • Fritz London
  • Heinz London
  • Joacquin Luttinger
  • Ernst Mach
  • Michel Magat
  • Benoît Mandelbrot
  • George Marx
  • Berndt Matthias
  • Philip Morrison
  • Philip M. Morse
  • Hans Mueller
  • Dénes Lajos Nagy
  • Isaac Newton
  • Lars Onsager
  • Wolfgang Pauli
  • Paul M. Quay
  • Willard Van Orman Quine
  • Abner Shimony
  • William Shockley
  • Clifford Shull
  • Francis Simon
  • Charles Squire
  • John Clarke Slater
  • John Stachel
  • Jack Steinberger
  • Edward Teller
  • Jean-Pierre Vigier
  • Felix Villars
  • Victor Weisskopf
  • William F. Whitmore
  • Cynthia Kolb Whitney
  • Eugene Wigner
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Boston University
  • Loránd Eötvös Physical Society
  • Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute
  • Collège de France
  • Institut Henri Poincaré
  • Nobel Prize
  • Fritz London Prize
  • Wolfskehl Prize
  • Pauli-Hamilton algebra
  • Vienna Circle
  • Lorentz group
  • relativity theory
  • theoretical physics
  • Macroscopic Thermodynamics of Equilibrium
  • generalized thermodynamics
  • entropy
  • specific heat
  • critical points
  • cryogenics
  • quantum mechanics
  • quantum electrodynamics
  • Bose-Einstein condensation
  • Bose-Einstein statistics
  • superfluid helium
  • phase transition
  • superfluidity
  • two-fluid theory of superfluidity
  • wave-particle duality
  • orientable particles
  • philosophy of physics
  • foundation of quantum mechanics
  • scientific revolution