Dirac's Claim and the Chemists

摘要

In 1929 Paul A. M. Dirac claimed that "the underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of ... the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble." This sentence of Dirac is cited frequently by historians and philosophers of chemistry in the context of discussions on the hypothetical reduction of chemistry to physics. But how did chemists themselves react to Dirac's claim? Did they feel threatened by physicists who felt they could do their job better than themselves? Did they fee indifferent, or did they simply not care? Was Dirac's paper often cited by chemists? Why was it cited? In this paper, I provide answers to these question on the basis of an analysis of citations to Dirac's 1929 paper in the Science Citation Index.