Experimental Blog #174

Quotations and notes from "The Quantum Ten" - A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science by Sheilla Jones and "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics" - A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World by James Kakalios

From "The Quantum Ten":
"By the 1960s, the fruitfulness of the math-driven theory and experimentation began to wane. There have been no new fundamental laws of nature discovered since the 1970s ..."
" ... modern physicists would say mathematical logic is truth. Indeed, no idea in modern physics can be considered credible until it is validated by mathematical logic."
" ... this fundamental incomprehensibility of quantum physics has become the proverbial elephant in the living room."

"Enter Louis de Broglie. His wave theory assumed that if a wave could be a particle, a particle could also be a wave. And not only did light exhibit properties of wave/particle duality, so did matter."
"He{Einstein} wanted a physical theory that was based on an objective and visualizable external world, not one that was fundamentally probabilistic, acausal, and random."

" .. matrix mechanics precluded visualization ..."
"He{Schrodinger} believed that physics, at the microscopic and macroscopic levels, was intelligible .."
"{Heisenberg} espoused the view that a mathematical truth was the same as a physical truth, and that metaphors or images were to be shunned."

From "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics":
   "There are three impossible things that we must accept in order to understand quantum mechanics:

   Light is an electromagnetic wave that is actually comprised of discrete packets of energy.
   Matter is composed of discrete particles that exhibit a wavelike nature.
   Everything - light and matter - has an "intrinsic angular momentum," or "spin," that can only have discrete values."

"The Schrodinger equation plays the same role in atomic physics that Newton's laws of motion play in the mechanics of everyday objects."
"The Schrodinger equation requires us to know the forces that act on the atomic electrons in order to figure out where the electrons are likely to be and what their energies are."
"What Schrodinger discovered was the quantum analog of Newton's force={mass}x{acceleration}."
"In 1926 Schrodinger was able to mathematically translate one approach{his} into the other{Heisenberg's}, demonstrating that the two descriptions are in fact equivalent."

"Anything bigger than an atom or a small molecule has such a large mass that its corresponding de Broglie wavelength is too small to ever be detected."
 "The quantum descriptions of Schrodinger and Heisenberg accurately account for the properties of a single atom ..."