Jagdish Mehra's historical account of the Solvay Conferences from
1911 to 1973 demonstrates not only the great influence which these
conferences have had on the development of modern physics, but it
also shows clearly how far-sighted and well planned were the
intentions of Ernest Solvay when he took the initiative for
organizing a new type of international conferences. In contrast to
the conventional meetings in which reports are given on the
successful solution of scientific problems, the Solvay Conferences
were conceived to help directly in solving specific problems of
unusual difficulty. The importance of the quantum structure of
Nature had become well under stood already by 1911, but at that
time there was no hope for an answer to the ex tremely difficult
new questions posed by the atomic phenomena. The new conferences
should therefore be devoted primarily to thorough discussions of
such problems be tween a small number of the most competent
physicists, and Ernest Solvay was guided by the hope that the
discussions would eventually lead to a real and substantial
progress. The earliest Solvay Conferences which I attended were
those of 1927, 1930 and 1933, and they served this purpose
extremely well. In 1926 the mathematical formalism of quantum-and
wave-mechanics approached its final shape, but the interpretation
was still controversial. Schrodinger hoped that his matter waves
could be considered as waves in three-dimensional space and time,
and that the discontinuous feature of quantum 'jumps' could be
avoided thereby."
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