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American Journal of Physics

How Rutherford missed discovering quantum mechanical identity

Georges M. Temmer

Published Mar 1, 1989• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An interesting quirk in the energy dependence of alpha-particle scattering from helium caused Lord Rutherford to miss a major discovery—namely, the consequences of quantum mechanical identity—before their prediction by Mott a short time later.
DOI
10.1119/1.16096

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ABSTRACT On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Ernest Rutherford's birth I discuss how indistinguishabilty profoundly affects the collisions of identical particles. In the case of a Coulombic interaction this leads to a dramatic modification of Rutherford's famous scattering formula as predicted by Nevill Mott. An even more extreme example is provided by a low‐energy scattering experiment of identical fermions interacting via a short range potential. Here indistinguishability will make or break the observation of scattered particles. This fascinating phenomenon has been observed using a laser‐based collider for ultracold fermionic potassium atoms.
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The aim of Niels Bohr’s “great” paper was to try to explain how Ernest Rutherford’s planetary model of the atom could exist. Bohr never used the words “quantum jump” in the paper, but it became very much in vogue shortly after this. Max Planck and even A. Einstein had not yet made the full evolution beyond classical physics, and the purely classical atomic views of Rutherford and H. Nagaoka did not provide the explanation of the absorption and emission spectra of hydrogen. In truth, Bohr’s “theory” consisted of a very few equations, with very great assumptions. As de Broglie’s work became known, he was hailed for his advances and he would join the list of Nobel Prizes for advances in quantum theory. Wolfgang Pauli did not particularly like the wave and particle approach that de Broglie introduced with his pilot waves in 1924, and would forcefully express these objections a few years later at the Solvay conference.