Quantum Philosophy by Roland Omnes

Author:Roland Omnes [Omnes, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R V I I

we usually envisage it, but depends on the initial and final states of the atom at the very instant the jump takes place, and it has a meaning only at that time. Therefore, if we enumerate the atom’s possible states as Bohr did with his “quantum numbers” that label the energy levels, acceleration then becomes a quantity that depends on the quantum numbers of the initial and final states. Thus, acceleration may be replaced by a double-entry table of numbers, labeled by integers indicating the initial and the final states. Heisenberg is led to analogous considerations for position and velocity, which he replaces in a similar way by tables of numbers. He then succeeds in reformulating the essentials of the laws of mechanics using such tables. In 1924, Max Born, to whom Heisenberg has confided his discoveries as well as his bafflement, encourages him to publish his results, after informing him that his tables are called matrices by the mathematicians. With the help of Pascual Jordan, an invaluable recruit given his knowledge of these yet-little-used mathematical entities, he soon creates an almost complete version of a new mechanics, accompanied by a great number of predictions and results, all of them as valuable as they are convincing. This new theory is then refered to as matrix mechanics.

Not long before, in 1923, Louis de Broglie had published an altogether different idea, but which would bear its first fruits only after the publication of Heisenberg’s results. This is why, at the time, the two contributions were discussed in reversed chronological order. De Broglie’s idea was based on earlier work by Einstein, who had interpreted Planck’s quanta of luminous energy as well as the characteristics of the photoelectric effect (where electrons are emitted by a metal under the action of light) as being due to the existence of grains of light: the photons. And so Einstein reactivated the old idea of the corpuscular nature of light, and managed to demonstrate, however incompletely, that the existence of photons did not contradict interference phenomena. Light, which ordinarily manifests itself as a wave, is made up of particles. Why, asked de Broglie, couldn’t this idea be turned upside down and generalized by assuming that every elementary object, an electron, for instance, which normally appears to be a particle, is associated with a wave that we have not yet perceived, with a wave function*

that we do not imagine?

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