时间：2025年7月18日（周五）10:00~11:30

Time：10:00~11:30 AM, Friday, July. 18th, 2025

地点：西湖大学云谷校区E10-201阶梯教室

Venue: E10-201, Yungu Campus

主持人：西湖大学理学院 讲席教授吴从军

Host: Chair Professor Congjun Wu, School of Science

主讲人/Speaker：

Michael Janssen

Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota

Michael Janssen is a professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota, and a Distinguished Professorial Fellow at the University of Bonn. He studied philosophy and theoretical physics at the University of Amsterdam and earned his master's degree there. He received his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of the History of Science, and a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award. In addition to numerous research papers, Professor Janssen has published about ten monographs, collections of papers, and special journal issues on the history of physics, focusing on the history of relativity and quantum mechanics. His most recent book is the two-volume monograph titled Constructing Quantum Mechanics (Oxford Univ. Press).

报告题目/Title:

Arch and Scaffold: Jordan’s statistical transformation theory and von Neumann’s Hilbert space formalism

讲座摘要/Abstract:

In early 1927, Paul Dirac and Pascual Jordan, independently of one another, published their versions of a general formalism tying the various forms of the new quantum theory together and giving the theory’s statistical interpretation in full generality. This formalism has come to be known as the Dirac-Jordan (statistical) transformation theory. A few months later, in response to these publications, John von Neumann published his Hilbert space formalism for quantum mechanics. The relation between these two formalisms can be captured in terms of a metaphor of arches and scaffolds that I have argued fits a number of instances of theory change in physics. What is unclear in this case is which formalism serves as the scaffold and which one as the arch. Did von Neumann build an arch on the scaffold built by Jordan? Or did von Neumann build a scaffold to prevent the arch built by Jordan from collapsing?

讲座联系人/Contact:

科技合作部 sci-tech02@westlake.edu.cn