“There are probably readers who will share the
present writer’s feeling that the methods of non-commutative
algebra are harder to follow, and certainly much more difficult to
invent, than are operations of types long familiar to analysis.”
([44], p. 654)
More interesting is Frenkel’s remark about Darwin’s presentation of Dirac’s equations in a form analogous to Maxwell’s equations [44]:
“This relation between the wave-mechanical
equations of a ‘quantum of electricity’ and the electromagnetic
field equations, which may be looked at as wave-mechanical
equations for photons, ought to have a fundamental physical
meaning. Therefore, I do not think it is superfluous to win the
wave equation of the electron as a generalisation of M a x w e l
l’s equations.” 221
([140
], p. 357)
H. T. Flint of King’s College in London
aimed at describing the electron in a Maxwell-like way within a
five-dimensional approach. He saw two “unsatisfactory points” in
Dirac’s approach, the introduction of the operator , and the mass term
. In order to mend these thin spots he wrote down two
Maxwell’s equations,
“unnecessary to introduce in any arbitrary way
terms and operators to account for quantum phenomena.” ([128],
p. 653; [127])
By adding four spinor equations at his choosing to Dirac’s equation, Wisniewski in Poland arrived at a “system of equations similar to Maxwell’s”. His conclusion sounds a bit strange:
“These equations may be interpreted as equations for the electromagnetic field in an electron gas whose elements are electric and magnetic dipoles.” [388]
In this context, another unorthodox suggestion was put forward by A. Anderson who saw matter and radiation as two phases of the same substrate:
“We conclude that, under sufficiently large
pressure, even at absolute zero normal matter and black-body
radiation (gas of light quanta) become identical in every sense.
Electrons and protons cannot be distinguished from quanta of light,
gas pressure not from radiation pressure.” 222
Anderson somehow sensed that charge conservation was in his way; he meddled through by either assuming neutral matter, i.e., a mixture of electrons and protons, or by raising doubt as to “whether the usual quanta of light are strictly electrically neutral” ([3], p. 441).
One of the German theorists trying to keep up
with wave mechanics was Gustav Mie. He tried to reformulate
electrodynamics into a Schrödinger-type equation and arrived at a
linear, homogeneous wave equation of the Klein-Gordon-type for the
-function on the continuum of the components of the
electromagnetic vector potential [231]. Heisenberg and Pauli, in their paper on the
quantum dynamics of wave fields, although acknowledging Mie’s
theory as an attempt to establish the classical side for the
application of the correspondence principle, criticised it as a
formal scheme not yet practically applicable [158].