The Niels Bohr Archive's                      Monday 10 April 2000 at 14.15
History of Science Seminar                    Auditorium M, Niels Bohr Institute
                                              Blegdamsvej 21, Copenhagen


                                Dieter Hoffmann
   Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

                     A Centre for Early Quantum Physics

The talk will describe Berlin's place in the history of early quantum physics.
With the creation of a new radiation law and the introduction of h by Max
Planck, Berlin physicists played a pioneering role in the establishment of
quantum theory. But their contribution to early quantum physics is not limited
to that - the precision measurements of light radiation and in some other fields
(e.g., photochemistry) at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the low
temperature investigations by Walther Nernst, as well as a host of other other
research and scientific activities, made Berlin into a leading centre for
quantum physics during the first decades of the twentieth century.