Talk:Lamb shift
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Contributions of William V. Houston and Yu-Ming Hsieh
[edit]Wondering if it would be appropriate to acknowledge the 1933 experiments of Houston and Hsieh at Caltech in this page? See the following excerpt:
Hsieh was an accomplished researcher. Collaborating with William V. Houston (1900–1968) at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Hsieh completed in 1933 some very significant experiments which ‘born directly on the worth of quantum field theory in general and the renormalizability of quantum electrodynamics in particular.’ Examining the fine structure of the Balmer lines of hydrogen, Houston and Hsieh found a ‘large’—about 3 percent—discrepancy between the theoretical prediction and their experimental results. Based on their ‘sufficiently accurate’ measurements and inspired by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s and Niels Bohr’s remarks concerning the widespread ignorance of ‘the effect of the interaction between the radiation field and the atom’ or self-energy in contemporary theoretical predictions, they boldly suggested that ‘the theory is no longer satisfactory’ and attributed the discrepancy to ‘the effect of the interaction between the radiation field and the atom [that is, self-energy]’. Houston was the primary investigator in this experiment, who, well versed in theoretical quantum mechanics, likely led the investigation to reach this remarkable conclusion. Unfortunately, the excellent paper of Houston and Hsieh was largely neglected and forgotten for more than a decade until Willis Eugene Lamb (1913–2008) confirmed the same discrepancy with his precise measurement in a newly designed experiment in late 1947. In 1955, Lamb received the Nobel Prize in physics ‘for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum’. The significant contribution of Houston and Hsieh was not recognized until 1986, when Crease and Mann published their study concerning the intriguing genesis of the famous Lamb Shift.
Source(s):
Hu, Danian, 'A Cradle of Chinese Physics Researchers: The Master of Science Program in the Physics Department of Yenching University, 1927–1941', in Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, and Alan Rocke (eds), History of Universities: Volume XXXIV/1: A Global History of Research Education: Disciplines, Institutions, and Nations, 1840-1950 (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Sept. 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844774.003.0014, accessed 19 Feb. 2025.
Science News. (1934). Science, 79(2038), 6a–8a. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1659677 (also accessible here https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.79.2038.6.s) 1themis (talk) 04:06, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Terminology
[edit]In the first section (lede?), it reads "the 2S1/2 and 2P1/2 orbitals of the hydrogen atom". But the linked-to Wikipedia article on orbitals doesn't appear to use this super/subscript notation, and I can't make sense of it. I think either this article or (more likely) the article on orbitals needs to be modified to explain this terminology. Mcswell (talk) 02:22, 9 January 2026 (UTC)