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Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation

EINSTEINʼS QUARREL WITH HEISENBERG AND NEILS BOHR

Mark Rudman

Published Mar 1, 1994• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Mark Rudman has been editor of Pequod Magazine for 10 years and is one of America's brilliant young poet-essayists. He has received numerous awards and a fellowship from the Poets, Essayists, and Novelists translation center. His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, 1991 and conversant essays, as well as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Mr. Rudman has published a book of criticism on Robert Lowell and two books of poetry, By Contraries and The Nowhere Steps. His poetry can be found in many magazines, including The New Yorker. Mr. Rudman lives in New York City where he teaches at Columbia University and New York University.

DOI
10.1097/00013614-199403000-00003

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Physics Today•May 1, 2001•1 citation
Mark Rudman has been editor of Pequod Magazine for 10 years and is one of America's brilliant young poet-essayists. He has received numerous awards and a fellowship from the Poets, Essayists, and Novelists translation center. His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, 1991 and conversant essays, as well as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Mr. Rudman has published a book of criticism on Robert Lowell and two books of poetry, By Contraries and The Nowhere Steps. His poetry can be found in many magazines, including The New Yorker. Mr. Rudman lives in New York City where he teaches at Columbia University and New York University.
Last year was the centenary of T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most influential of 20th-century poets writing in English. That Eliot pursued careers in publishing and banking in addition to his literary work is widely known, but many of his readers will be astonished to learn of the discovery last year of manuscripts that suggest he might at one time have been a student of physics. Published here for the first time, the poems are strongly influenced by the quantum theory that was growing vigorously when Eliot was a young man. They exhibit unmistakable echoes of “The Waste Land,” “Four Quartets” and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. (They also show remarkable physical prescience: Several of the ideas hinted at postdate Eliot's death in 1965.)
OUR EDITOR caught up with physicist David Bohm for a few days at Bailey Farm, a “think-tank” for lawyers in New York state. Autumn was crisp in the air with golden leaves and agreeable conversation as they walked together through the local woods. Bohm was in the middle of writing several books simultaneously with a number of his colleagues on the brood implications of his view of quantum physics for current ideas in psychology, sociology, and philosophy. In this wide-ranging interview, Bohm talks for the first time about his early scientific development, his relations with Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, and his idealistic struggles to actualize heightened states of being within a creative community. He also talks about imagery, stress, and the difficult evolutionary struggle in which we are currently engaged to free our minds from the negative conditioning of the past and the conceptual blind alleys of the present. David Bohm takes us on a journey into the post-modern world, a cultural step beyond relativity and quantum theory.
Once I tried to teach some quantum mechanics to a class of law students, philosophers, and art historians. As an advertisement for the course I put together the most sensational quotations I could collect from the most authoritative practitioners of the subject. Heisenberg was a goldmine: “The concept of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated…”; “the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them … is impossible …” Feynman did his part too: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” But I failed to turn up anything comparable in the writings of Bohr. Others attributed spectacular remarks to him, but he seemed to take pains to avoid any hint of the dramatic in his own writings. You don't pack them into your classroom with “The indivisibility of quantum phenomena finds its consequent expression in the circumstance that every definable subdivision would require a change of the experimental arrangement with the appearance of new individual phenomena,” or “the wider frame of complementarity directly expresses our position as regards the account of fundamental properties of matter presupposed in classical physical description but outside its scope.” I was therefore on the lookout for nuggets when I sat down to review these three volumes – a reissue of Bohr's collected essays on the revolutionary epistemological character of the quantum theory and on the implications of that revolution for other scientific and non-scientific areas of endeavor (the originals first appeared in 1934, 1958, and 1963.)
The review by Daniel M. Greenberger of Russell Stannard’s The New World of Mr. Tompkins (Physics Today, June 2000, page 57) intrigued me sufficiently that I obtained a copy of this revised and extended version of George Gamow’s (now dated) three classic works for the general reader. I agree with much of what Greenberger writes. Stannard has “done a remarkable job of preserving the mood and feeling of the original,” and I hope that at least some of the few small slips will be edited out before this commendable book is reprinted.One error, however, struck me rather forcibly. In the diagram on page 159, the professor is lecturing to his evening audience, which contains the (as usual) dozing Mr. Tompkins. A slide of the Bohr-Sommerfeld orbits for principal quantum numbers n = 2,3 has been projected onto the screen. Unfortunately, the orbits with highest azimuthal quantum number (orbital angular momentum quantum number l) are shown as ellipses with the highest eccentricity, while the s-orbits (l = 0) are shown as circles. This confusion of “penetrating” with “nonpenetrating” orbits is common, occasioned perhaps by the recollection that in the wave-mechanical picture, the s-orbitals are spherically symmetrical, albeit with the important property that their probability densities peak at the origin. This property is of vital importance, for example, for the Lamb shift and the Fermi contact interaction in hyperfine structure, quite apart from the fact that the quantum defects are therefore largest for the s-orbitals in many-electron atoms. For comparison purposes, excellent diagrams of these two distinctly different forms of representation may be found in reference 11. H. E. White, Introduction to Atomic Spectra, McGraw-Hill, New York, (1934), pp. 47–71..How did this unfortunate mistake occur in the new work? On turning to its predecessor, 2 2. G. Gamow, Mr. Tompkins in Paperback, Cambridge U. Press, (1965) pp. 132–133. one finds on page 132 a picture containing the same Bohr–Sommerfeld orbits and, in addition, the quantization rules in the “old quantum theory” and formulas for the energies. (A keen-eyed reader will spot that the electronic charge e is raised to the wrong power in two places.) Moreover, in this diagram by Gamow himself, the orbitals are labeled in exactly the same incorrect fashion: The s- and d-labels should be interchanged.This brought to mind the amusing account in Gamow’s delightful “informal autobiography” My World Line (I write from memory of a book read well over two decades ago), in which he describes his initial difficulties on arrival from Russia at the University in Göttingen, home of the “new quantum theory,” around 1928. The easier problems having already been solved, his contemporaries were then working on aspects of atomic theory requiring considerable dexterity in advanced special function theory, and the sort of heavy algebraic manipulation (“exerei”) that Gamow disliked, topology and group theory being more appealing to him. On a certain day, the frustrated young Gamow was sitting on a park bench, wondering what to do. His eye fell on the description by Ernest Rutherford, in the Philosophical Magazine that he happened to be carrying, of a now rather implausible idea invoked to explain the escape of alpha particles from the atomic nucleus. In a flash of inspiration, Gamow sketched out in his mind the correct explanation, involving “quantum tunneling” and the now famous “Gamow factor.” When one considers the author’s age of barely 24 years, the ensuing paper 3 3. G. Gamow, Z. Phys. 51, 204 (1928) https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01343196. makes an astonishing impression of both maturity and unusual clarity, attributes that of course lent themselves admirably in due course to writing the “Tompkins” books.Making a hypothesis of my own, I surmised that his inattention to detail regarding the electron orbitals was perhaps a consequence of this early predilection for nuclear, rather than atomic, physics. But no—on turning to my last source, 4 4. G. Gamow, Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom, Cambridge U. Press, (1946), pp. 72–74. I found not only the best drawing of all three (again by Gamow), but the orbits correctly labeled! No doubt the professor himself could comment most aptly on this mutilation of his original over time.REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<1. H. E. White, Introduction to Atomic Spectra, McGraw-Hill, New York, (1934), pp. 47–71. Google Scholar2. G. Gamow, Mr. Tompkins in Paperback, Cambridge U. Press, (1965) pp. 132–133. Google Scholar3. G. Gamow, Z. Phys. 51, 204 (1928) https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01343196. Google ScholarCrossref, CAS4. G. Gamow, Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom, Cambridge U. Press, (1946), pp. 72–74. Google Scholar© 2001 American Institute of Physics.