Melba Phillips talks about one of the theoretical physics summer sessions she attended at the University of Michigan in 1929.

Phillips:

(laughs) In 1929 I attended a theoretical physics summer session at the University of Michigan.

Sopka:

One of the famous ones.

Phillips:

One of the famous ones, Condon was giving talks on quantum mechanics, It was before the publication of Condon and Morse. The course was Condon and Morse as it was being written. Dirac was there and there Text on Quantum Mechanics, were a number of other well known people, I learned some things I’ve never forgotten, about spectroscopy, atomic spectroscopy, from the people at Michigan who knew these things very well, That was extremely useful, but I had very little background for quantum mechanics, and I certainly didn’t understand Dirac at that age, I was so naive that I did the home work in Ed’s class, and at one point I was trying to check on some of the stuff he’d given us and I couldn’t get the same answer that he did, and I still remember that I couldn’t dream that I wasn’t making mistakes, I couldn’t possibly understand why I wasn’t getting the answer, and I even asked myself the question: “Is it possible that I don’t know how to take the complex conjugate of a number?” Finally I went and asked the teacher, namely Ed Condon, and it turned out that I was right. I think that maybe he looked at me twice at that point, How did I get to California? Because Ed had been there.