Abstract
A comparative study is undertaken that brings to light the two different methods of how to treat the many-body problem in quantum field theory. The two main researchers who published the first versions of how to quantize a many-body assembly were P. Jordan and P.A.M. Dirac. What they understood by the so-called “second quantization” will be the subject of the paper. We will argue that it is Jordan’s field operator approach that until now constitutes the basis of any work in quantum field theory.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
A. Einstein, Phys. Zeits. 10, 185 (1909)
M. Born, W. Heisenberg, P. Jordan, Zeit. Phys. 35, 557 (1925)
S.S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It (Princeton University Press, 1994)
P.A.M. Dirac, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 114, 243 (1927)
P. Jordan, O. Klein, Zeit. Phys. 45, 751 (1927)
S. Varro, in Fluctuation and Noise Letters (World Scientific, 2006), Vol. 6
W. Heisenberg, Physikalische Prinzipien der Quantentheorie (BI Taschenbücher, Mannheim, 1958)
P. Jordan, Phys. Zeits. XXX, 700 (1929)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dittrich, W. The cofounder of quantum field theory: Pascual Jordan. EPJ H 40, 241–260 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjh/e2015-60005-9
Received:
Revised:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjh/e2015-60005-9