Einstein and the Quantum by Stone A. Douglas

Author:Stone, A. Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 20.1. Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in discussion, circa 1925–30. Photograph by Paul Ehren fest, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

So this was the revolutionary step that Einstein, who had mused on spectral lines as early as 1905, had not been willing to take. The frequency of light had nothing to do with the frequency of motion of the electron in the atom—who would have guessed? Einstein, the originator of so many “crazy” leaps of intuition himself, could recognize one when he saw it. What impressed him were not Bohr’s calculations, which were simple, but the insight to guess what one should keep and what one should drop from the laws of classical physics. Much later he lauded Bohr’s achievement thus:

All my attempts, however, to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this [quantum] knowledge failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built. That this insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s unique instinct and tact to discover the major laws of the spectral lines and of the electron-shells of the atoms, together with their significance for chemistry, appeared to me like a miracle—and appears to me as a miracle even today. This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.

Inspired by the establishment of the Bohr postulates for the atom, Einstein was able to write a crucial coda to Bohr’s composition shortly after he returned to quantum cogitation in 1916, one that would add a new framework to the insecure foundation of the developing quantum theory.

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