A History of Physics as an Exercise in Philosophy

ions much more so than in the past Such occurrences have notably coincided with events referred to as transitions from classical to nonclassical physics. The terminology classical‘nonclassical is here taken to refer to an attempted extension of existing classical procedures to the realm of microphysics. Such extensions were found to be subject to not earlier noted limitations. Hence a discipline, initially thought to be complete, turned out be incomplete. If a more rigorous test of completeness were to emerge, one might hope that the artifact of a classical-nonclassical division might become a thing of the past. At this juncture Planck, Einstein, Bohr and Sommerfeld had given sundry formulations of those restrictions, which finally culminated in what are now known as the Bohr-Sommerfeld relations. The latter imposed discrete quantized values for the action integrals of analytical mechanics, whereas before they could assume a continuum of values. This scholarly and logical approach met the best traditions of working from physics to mathematics. Yet this codification of the