Die Ecksteine des physikalischen Weltbildes
6. Symmetrie und Symmetriebrechung
Folie 11
Dirac erinnert sich (2)
Then the idea occurred quite independently to
two Young Dutch physicists, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel
Goudsmit. They were working in Leiden
with Professor Paul Ehrenfest, and they wrote up a little paper
about it and took it to Ehrenfest.
Ehrenfest liked the idea very much.
He suggested to Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit that they should
go and talk it over with Hendrik Lorentz, who lived close by in Haarlem. They did go and talk it over with Lorentz. Lorentz said, "No, it's quite
impossible for the electron to have a spin. I have thought
of that myself, and if the electron did have a spin, the speed of the surface
of the electron would be greater than the velocity of light. So, it's quite
impossible." Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit went back to Ehrenfest and said they would like
to withdraw the paper that they had given to him. Ehrenfest said, "No,
it's too late; I have already sent it in for publication "
That is how the idea
of electron spin got publicized to the world.
We really owe it to Ehrenfest's impetuosity and to his
not allowing the younger people to be put off by the older ones. The idea of the electron having two states
of spin provided a perfect answer to the duplexity.