Research-kortemeyer-physical tourist

Phys. Perspect. 12 (2010) 89–99
¨ Ó 2009 Birkhauser Verlag, Basel/Switzerland 1422-6944/10/010089-11 DOI 10.1007/s00016-009-0005-x

Physics in Perspective

The Physical Tourist A European Study Course
Gerd Kortemeyer and Catherine Westfall*
We organized and led a European study course for American undergraduate university students to explore the early history of relativity and quantumtheory. We were inspired by The Physical Tourist articles published in this journal on Munich, Bern, Berlin, Copenha¨ gen, and Gottingen. We describe this adventure both for others wishing to teach such a course and for anyone wishing to walk in the footsteps of the physicists who revolutionized physics in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Key words: Niels Bohr; Max Born; Albert Einstein;Otto Hahn; Werner Heisenberg; Lise Meitner; J. Robert Oppenheimer; Wolfgang Pauli; Max Planck; ¨ Erwin Schrodinger; Arnold Sommerfeld; Fritz Strassmann; University of Munich; ¨ Deutsches Museum; Kerschensteiner Kolleg; University of Bern; Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule; University of Zurich; University of Berlin; Humboldt University; Deutsches Technik Museum; Caputh; Niels Bohr Institute;Niels Bohr ¨ Archive; University of Gottingen; relativity theory; quantum theory.

Introduction
We describe a senior-level course on the history of physics that we, a physicist and a historian of physics, taught ‘‘on location’’ for five weeks in Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark for seventeen undergraduate students, most of whom were majoring in pre-medicine and had little preparation or interestin physics. Our course prompted positive reactions from our students, who reported that they learned a great deal, as we ourselves also did.

Munich
Our first stop was Munich, Germany, which was a good city to visit, since Max Planck attended secondary school (Gymnasium) there (1869–1874), as did Albert
* Gerd Kortemeyer is Assistant Professor of Physics at Michigan State University. CatherineWestfall is Visiting Associate Professor of History of Science at Michigan State University.

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Phys. Perspect.

Fig. 1. The original experimental apparatus that Lise Meitner built and assembled in BerlinDahlem and that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann used later to detect the fissioning of uranium. Photograph by one of the authors (GK).

Einstein(1889–1895) and Werner Heisenberg (1911–1920). Planck went on to study at the University of Munich (1874–1885), as did Wolfgang Pauli (1918–1921) and Heisenberg (1920–1923), both of whom became brilliant students in Arnold ¨ Sommerfeld’s group. Jurgen Teichmann, Michael Eckert, and Stefan Wolff’s article, ‘‘Physicists and Physics in Munich,’’1 offers an excellent guide to sites associated with these andother physicists. Munich is an easy-going city, which provided our American undergraduate students a slow and safe introduction to Europe. Munich is home to the Deutsches Museum, the largest museum of science and technology in Europe. We were guests of the comfortable Kerschensteiner Kolleg, living in the museum itself, and having free access to the exhibits anytime during the day, as well as to aseminar room. The Deutsches Museum has excellent exhibits on the history of atomic physics, including hands-on apparatus for the photoelectric effect, spectroscopy, Compton scattering, and on the history of nuclear physics, including the original apparatus used in the discovery of nuclear fission (figure 1). This apparatus, which for decades was incorrectly attributed to Otto Hahn, actually wasbuilt and assembled by Lise Meitner in her laboratories in Berlin-Dahlem before she was forced to escape from Germany in the summer of 1938,2 after which Hahn and Fritz Strassmann used it to detect the fissioning of uranium at the end of that December. A particular benefit of staying in the Kerschensteiner Kolleg was that the museum provided talks by curators of the exhibits as well as excellent...