Kuhn:
Not only no positive reactions, but no negative reactions either?
Slater:
No. Also I switched around some, from one thing to another, because I found I was doing the same thing that Dirac was doing. I had followed along with this business of derivatives versus differentials and so on, so that as soon as the Heisenberg stuff was coming along I was right playing with those things. As a matter of fact, I had a paper all written—here’s another document that might be interesting to resurrect if one could find it—in which I was pointing out—and it had never been done before—the relation between the Poisson brackets in classical mechanics and the commutator in quantum mechanics. I had this all written down, ready to send the thing into Phys. Rev. the next day. The next day Dirac‘s paper came doing the same thing. No, I had that all worked out. That was Dirac's first paper, I had never heard of Dirac.
Kuhn:
I must say there were damm few people who had at that point.
Slater:
But at that point I decided here’s somebody who’s going to run me a race, and then I proceeded a year or so later to do this absorption business with Schroedinger’s equation which did the absorption all right, but the radiation didn’t work, and Dirac’s paper on that came out at just the same time.
Van Vleck:
Weren’t you the first one on the absorption?
Slater:
I think I probably was. I think I may have been a bit before Dirac, but clearly we were running a race, and clearly he was a smart guy, and I decided I’d better shift to something else. That’s when I shifted to doing helium. I just decided that obviously our thoughts were running so much along the same line that if I kept on without shifting I’d just find every paper I wrote was written by him first.
Kuhn:
Somebody else got caught in that trap and couldn’t decide for some time what to shift to: that’s Jordan, who really, one paper after another, he and Dirac, Dirac always a little earlier, and almost always a little neater.
Slater:
Yes, that’s right. I decided that this was no race to be in.
Kuhn:
I’d love to see that manuscript.
Slater:
There again I don’t know whether I’ve even got that. But I think it would be interesting to look back and see if I could find this. I didn’t go nearly as far as Dirac, but I had some of the same things.
Kuhn:
It’s again no issue of who had it, the question is just how close to the surface that was is very much illuminated by simultaneities of this sort.
Slater:
I’d be interested if I can find my own calculations of those dates to find just what I was thinking about, because I know that I was really working toward quantum mechanics before quantum mechanics came out. I’m sure if it had been delayed a year or so more, I would have got it before the others did. In other words, there were a number of people so close that it was bound to be found. I was working along the lines from the Kramers-Heisenberg dispersion formula to try to formulate general quantum mechanics rules that would handle other problems. And I saw that you had to get meanings for Poisson’s brackets and that they were commutators and so on. In other words, I was very close to the Heisenberg formulation before he had it, but I didn’t get there.
Kuhn:
Your Poisson bracket expression was actually not only simultaneous with Dirac’s, but it was independent of Heisenberg’s.
Slater:
I would have to look back to find out just how this was standing.
Kuhn:
Dirac definitely takes off from the Heisenberg paper.
Slater:
I guess probably I was taking off from the Heisenberg paper too, but also I was thinking along the same lines as Heisenberg before the Heisenberg paper. In other words, I was thinking along these lines from the time I came back from Copenhagen. The dispersion formula which I was thinking about in Copenhagen started me on these lines, as it started Heisenberg on these lines.