ABSTRACT
The European physics community barely had time to comprehend the significance of matrix mechanics in late 1925 and early 1926 when wave mechanics burst onto the scene. This new theory was presented in a series of five papers which appeared at the rate of almost one a month, each completed and posted for publication before the ideas of the next were fully formed. 1 Their author, Erwin Schrödinger, had followed the fortunes of atomic theory and had contributed several papers on the subject; 2 but he could not be counted among those who had undertaken its sustained development. He has claimed that his acute awareness of the unsystematic and ad hoc character of its foundations kept him from becoming deeply involved in that development. 3 How, then, did he come to make such a major contribution to atomic theory, indeed to set the mold by which our modern theories of microphysics are fashioned?
