John C. Slater - Early Education

Early Education

Slater's father, born in Virginia, who had been an undergraduate at Harvard, became head of the English Department at the University of Rochester, which would also be Slater's undergraduate alma mater. Slater's youthful interests were with things mechanical, chemical, and electrical. A family helper, a college girl, finally put a name (then little-known as a subject) to his set of interests: physics. When Slater entered the University of Rochester in 1917 he took physics courses and as a senior assisted in the physics laboratory and did his first independent research for a special honors thesis, a measurement of the dependence on pressure of the intensities of the Balmer lines of hydrogen.

He was accepted into Harvard graduate school, with the choice of a fellowship or assistantship. He chose the assistantship, during which he worked for Percy W. Bridgman. He followed Bridgman's courses in fundamental physics and was introduced into the then new quantum physics with the courses of E. C. Kemble. He completed the work for the Ph.D. in three years by publishing his (1924) paper Compressibility of the Alkali Halides, which embodied the thesis work he had done under Bridgman. However his heart was in theory and his first publication was not his doctor's thesis, but a note (1924) to Nature on Radiation and Atoms.

After receiving his Ph.D., Slater held a Hamard Sheldon Fellowship for study in Europe. He spent a period in Cambridge, England, before going to Copenhagen. There he explained to Bohr and Kramers his original idea that classical radiation fields guided light quanta, a sort of forerunner of the duality principle. The result of Slater's conversations was the celebrated paper (1924) on "The Quantum Theory of Radiation" published in the Philosophical Magazine. Known as the BKS paper for its authors, this paper resulted in Slater suddenly becaming an internationally known name. Interest in this "old-quantum-theory" paper subsided with the arrival of full quantum mechanics, but Philp M. Morse's biography states that "in recent years it has been recognized that the correct ideas in the article are those of Slater."

On returning to America, Slater joined the Harvard Physics Department.