Archive of historical materials
Lecture: Sound and Heat in Quantum Theory
OU1938-C4 (25 pages) Date: February 10, 1938
This is the manuscript of the lecture given in the 124th Physics Colloquium held on February 10 (Thursday) in the large lecture hall in the School of Science building at Osaka Imperial University. The lecture was titled “Sound and Heat in Quantum Theory,” and it focused mainly on the thermodynamical understanding of the sound and elucidation of the true identity of the heat in substances based on the understanding of the quantum theory. In the beginning, Yukawa said modestly, “I don’t have specialized knowledge of these, so my discussions may become somewhat superficial,” but he had great interest and in-depth understanding of those subjects from the perspective of quantum physics. He introduced the papers written by Hodge, Hubbard, Rutgers, Peierls, Einstein and Debye. Yukawa talked about the topics that later formed the foundation of the condensed physical theory we know today in order to stress the importance of quantum mechanics to the students and his colleagues in the era when only a few people understood quantum mechanics even in the Department of Physics. (Written by Yutaka Hosotani)
