Georg Rumer: A Microbiography

The August 2004 issue of Physics Today contains two interesting articles (page 45 and page 51) devoted to the legacy of Edward Teller. They supplement his own recently published memoirs and help the reader to better understand this central Figure in 20th-century physics and politics.

Neither Teller's memoirs nor these articles mention one of the most influential scientific achievements associated with him: the 1932 paper by Georg Rumer, Teller, and Hermann Weyl.¹ That work laid the foundation for the quantum theory of chemical valence by introducing what is now called the theory of resonance structures.

I learned about this work from Rumer, who later continued it alone. An oustanding Russian physicist, Yurij Borisovich Rumer (1901-85) was known in the West as Georg. He spent a few years in Germany just at the big bang of quantum mechanics. In a small booklet published in Novosibirsk to mark the 100th anniversary of Rumer's birth, one can find fragments of his recollections of his contacts with David Hilbert, Albert Einstein, Lev Landau, George Gamow, Max Born, John von Neumann, and other great scientists. These recollections, carefully transcribed from tape recordings, preserved Rumer's colloquial style.

Rumer's life was full of adventures before Göttingen and very difficult afterward. He spent years in Stalin's prisons and in exile; see The Quantum Generation: Highlights and Tragedies of the Golden Age of Physics by Margarita Ryutova-Kemoklidze (Springer, 1995). While in exile, Rumer published 10 papers and the book Studies in 5-optics (Gostekhizdat, 1956). Later he worked in Academgorodok, the academic community near Novosibirsk, where I was pleased to make his acquaintance. When we celebrated his 70th birthday, he decided not to give a formal speech. Instead, he told the audience about his favorite work of the past: his work on quantum chemistry with Teller and Weyl.