Applied Group Theory 1926–1935

Abstract

The articles written before 1931 can be regarded to a large extent as precursors to Wigner’s seminal work “Gruppentheorie and ihre Anwendung auf die Quantenmechanik der Atomspektren”, [1] which appeared in that year. The importance of this book can scarcely be overstated. In the preface to the English edition [2], which was published 28 years later, Wigner remarks that there was a great reluctance among physicists toward accepting group-theoretical arguments and the group-theoretical point of view. He also comments that this antipathy has subsequently vanished. One of the reasons for this is, of course, the influence that his book had on a generation of physicists. However, at the time of its publication, and for some years afterwards, opposition to group theory was real enough. In the rush to fit theory to experiment, simplicity in the mathematical treatment counted for more than elegance and generality. The uncompromising tone of Weyl’s treatise on group theory and quantum mechanics [3] scarcely made the subject more accessible to physicists. They were more impressed by the success Slater [4] achieved in obtaining expressions for the energies of spectroscopic terms by elementary mathematical methods. Condon and Shortley [5] explicitly rejected the group-theoretical approach. Their algebraic methods were extended by Racah [6], and is was not until he published his fourth article [7] on complex spectra that group theory became an accepted part of theoretical atomic spectroscopy.