Arnold Sommerfeld: Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel. Band 1: 1892–1918.

Arnold Sommerfeld: Scientific Correspondence. Volume 1: 1892–1918. [German language.] Around the turn of the twentieth century, Sommerfeld’s career led him from mathematics through engineering to theoretical physics—at a time when the discipline had scarcely been established as an independent field. This circumstance, together with Sommerfeld’s exceptional gifts as a teacher and the breadth of his interests, made him one of the defining academic figures in his field. From the “training ground of theoretical physics” at the University of Munich, which he himself founded and so named, emerged such later Nobel laureates as Peter Debye, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Hans Bethe. Heisenberg described his teacher as one of the “last physicists who were able to encompass the whole of the physics of their time in their knowledge and to carry out valuable research in almost all areas of theoretical physics.” As the center of a rapidly growing and highly successful circle of physicists, Sommerfeld remained throughout his life at the heart of the history of his discipline. What holds true for his scientific work is equally evident in his scholarly correspondence: more than any other exchange of letters, it reflects the full breadth of the history of physics in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim of this edition is to make that correspondence accessible to research in the history of science. The first volume begins with Sommerfeld’s years as an assistant in Göttingen in the 1890s and concludes with the Bohr–Sommerfeld atomic model at the end of the First World War, which marked the high point of his scientific career. The second volume (doi: 10.47261/1626) contains the correspondence from 1919 to 1951. The roughly 300 letters printed in each volume represent only one tenth of the surviving correspondence. The letters not included in the edition are documented in a third volume, to be published in summer 2026 (doi: 10.47261/1647), which provides a brief summary of the contents of each letter and makes them accessible by person and keyword.