"An important episode for my understanding of conduction problems arose from a paper by Kretschmann, ... who attacked the then accepted theory of conductivity and claimed that the basis of the papers by Bloch and others was quite wrong. He had a number of objections which were mostly not very well conceived, but he claimed, in particular, that in the usual derivation of the Boltzmann equation one had made unjustified use of perturbation theory. In trying to defend the theory I therefore set out to prove that perturbation theory was in order, and to my amazement I found that this was very questionable, if not exactly for the reasons given by Kretschmann. It appeared that the usual application of Fermi's 'golden rule' depended on the inequality ħ/τ ≪ kT, where τ is the collision time. This was not satisfied for many metals. Indeed Landau's dimensional analysis made them comparable. ..."
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Academics from GermanyPhysicists from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyPhysicists from GermanyJews from Germany
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(quote from p. 34)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rudolf_Peierls
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Rudolf Peierls
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