XLVI National Congress of the Italian Society for the History of Physics and Astronomy

Revisiting the Long History of Quantum Theory

15 Sept 2026, 09:30

40m

The Physics of the Cat Keynote Speech

Speaker

Renn, Jürgen (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology)

Description

This paper presents results and methods from a collaborative international research project on the history of quantum physics. The project builds on decades of work on various aspects of the field's development, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. It aims at a synthesis of this century-long history, drawing on the research to dispel popular myths and give a wider public access to historical insights into how quantum physics developed. The project makes use of AI methods and demonstrates their potential for such a synthesis. To this end we developed QuHiRa (Quantum History Research Assistant), an AI assistant that opens up the project's corpus to historical inquiry.