Sommerfeld’s Atombau: A Case Study in Potential Truth Approximation

Abstract

The paper presents a case of potential truth approximation in physics: the sequence of relevant theories of the atom of Rutherford, Bohr, and Sommerfeld (the ‘old’ quantum theory of the atom), in the form as given in Sommerfeld’s Atombau und Spektrallinien. In particular, after a sketch of the historical and scientific background, it will first be shown in structuralist terms that Bohr’s theory is a specialization of Rutherford’s theory and that Sommerfeld’s theory in its turn is a concretization of Bohr’s theory. Then it wiJI be shown in general that a specialization followed by a concretization may well be a case of truth approximation in the sense of the structuralist theory of truth approximation, which would explain the increase of explanatory success of the successive theories.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.