In an effort to add content to this site, beyond my rants about education, I am going to start doing biographies of various interesting fellows in the history of physics. Today I begin with an interesting fellow who contributed to the early theory of solids, Arnold Sommerfeld.

Sommerfeld was born in Konigsberg in 1868, Sommerfeld did his dissertation in the field of mathematics, with Ferdinand von Lindemann [1] as his advisor. Sommerfeld’s physical contributions include a detailed study of the thermodynamics of the degenerate free electron gas [2], his namesake “quantization condition” of the old quantum mechanics, the study of electromagnetic waves in dispersive media, and a variety of other applications of the newly developed theory. Arnold Sommerfeld also holds the dubious distinction for being nominated the most times for a Nobel Prize in Physics, 74, and never receiving the prize himself.

However, four of his graduate students would receive their own Nobel Prizes: Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye, and Hans Bethe. Other notable graduate students of Sommerfeld’s are Leon Brillouin [3], Alfred Lande [4], Gregor Wentzel [5], and Wilhelm Lenz [6].

Sommerfeld died of injuries sustained from a traffic accident while walking with his grandchildren in 1951. Although he never received the Nobel Prize, his own students stand as a testament to Arnold Sommerfeld’s importance in the development of physics in the twentieth century.

[1] Other graduate students of von Lindemann include such luminaries as David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.

[2] Sommerfeld applied the theory of Fermi-Dirac statistics to the existing Drude model. The Drude model provided a reasonable physical picture of electrons in a solid, but because solids are inherently quantum mechanical, and Drude predated the development of quantum mechanics by several years, the theory was not quantitatively correct.

[3] For whom the Brillouin zones of solids are named.

[4] Who developed the g-factor for explaining the peculiar behavior of the Zeeman effect.

[5] The “W” in the “WKB approximation”.

[6] Who invented the Ising model, and the application of the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector in the “old” quantum mechanical treatment of hydrogen.