Quoting Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com>:
But what was the "strike at the roots of quantum mechanics" in 1950? By that date, quantum mechanics was generally well accepted. And what were the trace arguments that led to this strike? That the Heisenberg > algebra has no finite dimensional representation should have no bearing on everyday quantum theory, though it perhaps excludes a [q,p]= i hbar type mechanics over finite spaces.
There are all kinds of acceptance, which is why mentioning Heaviside may have been worthwhile. His methods worked, excellently for electrical engineers, while thoroughly offending mathematicians. Or at least he seems to have thought so. For a famous example, consider Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics, which were studied in depth by Bohm and later Bell. That didn't keep anyone from working with quantum mechanics, although it certainly did lead eventually to quite interesting experimental results. Seventy years later. (1935 paper = 40 yr) There is the dictum "shut up and compute" which we heard often when "what does quantum mechanics really mean? was asked. But if all was well in 1950, why was so much attention given to Laurent Schwarz's distribution theory? Dyson certainly took it seriously enough to decide that that it didn't cure quantum electrodynamic's divergences. For some background to Wintner's paper, recall that he did some of the early work defining Hilbert spaces, which somehow got deemphasized when von Neumann wrote "Mathematische Grundlagen ..." specifically to counter Dirac's presentation and the "fiction that all operators are self-adjoint." Also, who coined the term "Heisenberg Algebra, and at what date? Coming to grips with quantum mechanics certainly took time, and that people bothered must be some indication that all was not crystal clear. Another Diracism: "All of Chemistry and most of Physics is now in principle understood." -hvm ------------------------------------------------- www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos