I have an old physics textbook about the Bohr Model of the atom from the 1920s. I found it in a used book store in Berkeley back in the 1980s. My first reaction was WTF are those weird orbitals, circular, elliptical and even stranger. I had clearly found an artifact from early quantum theory. Thanks for providing more context. (There's a hand scrawled note on the frontispiece saying that an atomic bomb would be impossible, but a partial atomic bomb could be made. We don't draw that distinction these days.)
Your remark about quantum theory in the 1930s being in a awkward place and "if you just ignore the problems by leaving those terms out, it works just fine" reminds me of the way mathematicians look at Euler who was probably the last great high school mathematician. He did brilliant stuff if one ignored issues like convergence, singularities and various types of infinities, the sort of stuff modern mathematics is built on.
Good stuff! For the curious, here's a link to Dyson's paper:
https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.75.486
Also it should be noted that Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. A very big year, indeed.
I'm amazed that scientists in Japan were corresponding with Oppenheimer in 1948!
I have an old physics textbook about the Bohr Model of the atom from the 1920s. I found it in a used book store in Berkeley back in the 1980s. My first reaction was WTF are those weird orbitals, circular, elliptical and even stranger. I had clearly found an artifact from early quantum theory. Thanks for providing more context. (There's a hand scrawled note on the frontispiece saying that an atomic bomb would be impossible, but a partial atomic bomb could be made. We don't draw that distinction these days.)
Your remark about quantum theory in the 1930s being in a awkward place and "if you just ignore the problems by leaving those terms out, it works just fine" reminds me of the way mathematicians look at Euler who was probably the last great high school mathematician. He did brilliant stuff if one ignored issues like convergence, singularities and various types of infinities, the sort of stuff modern mathematics is built on.