Can I get electronic copies of the original QM papers?

[royp]

TL;DR Summary

The original papers by Planck, Bohr, De Brogole et al

Hello,

Is it possible to read the original, ground-breaking, pioneering papers of Quantum Mechanics - the papers by Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Louis De Brogile et al? In the form of electronic copy or a pdf format? I suppose the original 'copyrights' have expired and they should be available ; free of charge in some repositoty.

Please let me know any link you are aware of. Thanks in advance.

 

[fresh_42]

Like this one?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/andp.19013090310

And here are some other original papers, although not specifically QM:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/pre-1900s-educational-science-background.979169/#post-6251208

 

[royp]

Thanks fresh_42.

Sorry but I forgot to mention: I am looking for the English translations of the papers

 

[dextercioby]

The copyrights have not expired, because we are talking about journals, not books. Very many old journals have been bought by the current corporations (Wiley, Springer, Elsevier etc.) and the only known repository (JSTOR) is also not free.
English translations of the original (mostly written in German) papers are usually in books still under copyright.
Use the search function here on PF to get results on these papere. Use Wikipedia as well.

 

[Demystifier]

Is it possible to read the original ... papers

Just write down the exact reference into your google search engine. If a legal copy of the paper exists, google will probably find it. To help google find what you need, in addition to the exact reference you can also add "pdf".

 

[Dr.AbeNikIanEdL]

Another source (in particular if you do not have exact references, otherwise google will probably turn it up anyway as @Demystifier said) might be http://inspirehep.net/ and search for author names, e.g.

http://inspirehep.net/search?p=exactauthor:Albert.Einstein.1&sf=earliestdate
http://inspirehep.net/search?p=exactauthor:Max.Born.1&sf=earliestdate
http://inspirehep.net/search?p=exactauthor:E.Schrodinger.1&sf=earliestdate

Of course not all papers have links, some are paywalled, many are not translated and the lists are probably not complete (e.g. I only see two papers for Einstein in 1905).

 

[vanhees71]

For Einstein it's pretty easy, because the Einstein Paper Projects publishes all its editions for online reading for free. Unfortunately, it's not possible to download pdfs to print them out, but it's better than nothing, and its a legal source too!

https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/

 

[royp]

Many thanks to you all for your valuable suggestions. I guess, I have to look into the university libraries (hard copy) for a collection of these papers.

 

[fsonnichsen]

I know it is not electronic, but this book (around $15) is a nice condensation of key papers that may suit your purposes:
van der Waerden - Sources in Quantum Mechanics

I think you will find that much of the important historic information for QM is somewhat diffuse, spread through several lectures, letters, or papers so this is not an easy task. If you can befriend a university student or perhaps take a course you may gain access to a coveted online library account to obtain PDFs.

Also check out this:
https://unpaywall.org/
Under their "products" tab there is a "browser extension" feature that will unlock some papers. It works for me around 5% of the time and is legal.

This also has some bearing on the problem:
https://www.popsci.com/read-scientific-studies-free/
It is a shame that important research information is carefully hidden from the people that often pay for it with their tax dollars. The "owners" in most cases have contributed nothing and the scientists have to foot the bill to publish. And we are often asked by the editors to review a paper with no compensation. There has been a quiet movement afoot in the last decade to amend all of this and make scientific publications available to everyone---this is the scientific spirit!

fritz