David Stevenson's Reference Frame piece on tsunamis and earthquakes (PHYSICS TODAY, June 2005, page 10) is excellent. However, I offer a correction and an emendation.
Although Eugene Wigner did many things, he did not cofound the WKB approximation in 1926. Physicist Gregor Wentzel did. I got that information from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which despite beginning with a W was also not founded by Wigner.
And in a story devoted to the linkages between the physical
and Earth sciences, it's too bad Stevenson didn't refer more accurately to the approximation as
"WKBJ," and thereby give due credit to geophysicist Harold Jeffreys, whose work on the subject
actually preceded that of Wentzel and coworkers by three years.
Stevenson replies: I thank John Knox and several others for pointing out my incorrect attribution of
the W in WKB. The approximation predates their quantum mechanical application and was indeed to
be found in the work of Harold Jeffreys. An interesting website, http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/wkb.htm,
gives more historical details. The essential features of the so-called WKB or WKBJ approximation
were known even earlier1 but Lord Rayleigh already has too many things named after
him.
Reference
1. Lord Rayleigh, Proc. R. Soc. London, series A, 86(586), 207 (1912), eq. 67.
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