Einstein Defiant Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution (2004) / Chapter Skim
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22 How Much More Gratifying
22 How Much More Gratifying
Pages 218-226
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From page 218... ...
In Munich, Arnold Sommerfeld raised the news of de Broglie's thesis with his graduate students.They looked briefly but did not take the ideas seriously. It is often said that Einstein was viewed among physicists as a god and that even the greatest of them would grow humble and silent when he entered their presence.
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From page 219... ...
Relativity, especially general relativity, was, according to a future colleague,"his chief love." And like Einstein, Schrödinger thought that the existence of two different physical fields, gravitational and electromagnetic, occupying the same space at the same time was too ugly to endure, and he, too, longed for a unified field theory. So when his hero wrote that de Broglie's ideas "involve more than merely an analogy," Schrödinger decided to study this new theory, according to which "a moving corpuscle is nothing but the foam on a wave of radiation in the basic substratum of the universe." Debye and Schrödinger agreed that Schrödinger would investigate the "undulatory" idea more fully and report his findings to a colloquium.
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From page 220... ...
orbits. Bohr had visualized electrons orbiting an atom's nucleus, but if electrons really moved through the electric field of a nucleus, like planets orbiting the sun, the electrons would radiate energy and fall into the nucleus like a comet tumbling into the sun.
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From page 221... ...
Imagine four dancers holding hands while swinging around a circle. Now suppose a fifth dancer joins the group.The size of the whirling circle must grow, too, to allow room for the new dancer's arms.Suddenly two of the dancers leave.The remaining dancers must move into a tighter circle so that they can continue to hold hands while moving.De Broglie's orbit is the equivalent of the dancer's whirling circle, and each dancer is the equivalent of one full wave.As the number of waves in an orbit changes, so does it size.
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From page 222... ...
Schrödinger calculated that the speed of a moving particle and the speed of a wave packet matched. This kind of identity was the sort of thing that generally brought Einstein up on his toes because it hinted that behind the mathematical match there could be a real, physically meaningful identity.This match between the speed of particle and wave packet, Schrödinger declared, "can be used to establish a much more intimate connection between wave propagation and the motion of the representative point than was ever possible before." That talk of "the representative point" shows how profoundly Schrödinger's understanding of nature was already changing."The representative point" was an abstract term for what just a few months earlier he had called corpuscles or particles.
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From page 223... ...
In the hands of a skilled performer these separate notes will produce an audible beat, the vibrato that Einstein's own playing so notoriously lacked. A sensitive vibrato throbs like a heart rather than ticks like a clock.The sounds are produced by shifting frequencies.The sound reflects the differences between the wavelengths of the various, simultaneous notes, and the throbbing comes from the way the violinist keeps changing the string lengths so that the notes keep changing ever so slightly.
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From page 224... ...
Yes, the speed of a particle matches the speed of a wave packet, but where do all the elements of the basic wave form enter the story? The wave form is familiar to anybody who ever stood on a pier and watched the sea lapping below.Waves vary in height and length.Schrödinger's problem was that none of these elements appear in his final equation for the particle-packet's velocity.What kind of wave can there be when it has none of the wave form?
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From page 225... ...
space and not in real space." Nevertheless, Schrödinger's close attention to what was really going on was much appreciated by Einstein and his colleagues. Planck responded early to the articles, writing Schrödinger,"You can imagine the interest and enthusiasm with which I plunge into this study of these epoch-making works." Lorentz wrote,"If one can successfully explain the phenomenon [of fluctuating electron radiation]
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