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Routledge eBooks

Recent Developments in Atomic Theory

Leo Graetz

Published May 9, 2014• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Into the short compass of this book Professor Graetz has succeeded in compressing an eminently readable survey of the directions in which the atomic theory, as accepted in the nineteenth century, has been extended by the remarkable and almost revolutionary physical investigations and discoveries of the two decades preceding the book’s original publication in 1923.

DOI
10.4324/9781315779324

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Into the short compass of this book Professor Graetz has succeeded in compressing an eminently readable survey of the directions in which the atomic theory, as accepted in the nineteenth century, has been extended by the remarkable and almost revolutionary physical investigations and discoveries of the two decades preceding the book’s original publication in 1923.
So far, this book has dealt almost exclusively with classical physics, which is a theoretical structure based on many brilliant and imaginative experiments performed on macroscopic objects, that is on objects of about our size or a few orders of magnitude smaller or larger. Classical physics was found to give good results when extrapolated downward to molecules and upward to planets, stars, and galaxies, and it was seriously suggested ate in the nineteenth century that all the major discoveries in physics had been made — that the physical basis of the universe was understood and that only minor tidying-up remained.
PROF. J. K. ROBERTSON, professor of physics, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada de-livered on May 21, 1945, argues that the notions of continuity and discontinuity as used in physics and other sciences are complementary and not just contradictory. When, in the eighteenth century, physical theory was occupied with the continuous aspect of things it was natural to suppose that the structure of the world must be either continuous or discontinuous, not both. Therefore, since continuity was apparent, there could be no discontinuity anywhere, as Leibniz argued. The chemical atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gases of the nineteenth century brought out the aspect of discontinuity for the first time, and recent sub-atomic physics has gone a stage further. At every stage, however, as Prof. Robertson emphasizes, theory really requires both continuity and discontinuity. This was first realized in the case of light, which in some aspects is continuous, and in others discontinuous ; and, later, electrons were found to play a similar dual part. Granted that the single electron is discrete, indefinite and indeterminate, it should not be inferred that the continuity, definiteness and strict causality found in the behaviour of large numbers of electrons are not equally genuine aspects of the physical world. Prof. Robertson refers briefly to the way in which the biological theory of evolution requires both a continuous long-term aspect and a discontinuous short-term one ; and he ends by asking the question, whether new discoveries in science which look like discontinuities in the historical development of thought are not also in other respects examples of the continuity of thought.
Science has developed through a variety of investigations more or less over the time scale of human existence. On this scale, quantum mechanics is an extremely young field, existing essentially for only just over a century. Even our understanding of classical mechanics has existed for a comparatively long period—roughly having been formalized with Newton's equations published in his Principia Mathematica , in April 1686 (1687). Up until the very end of the nineteenth century, mechanics in the form of Newton's laws were comfortable, being understood and accepted by all who dealt with the motion of reasonable bodies. With the turn of the new century, however, mechanics would be shaken to its roots. The change began already on December 14, 1900, when Planck (1900) presented his new theory of black-body radiation to the German Physical Society, and this change would affect mechanics in physically small structures (and lead to quantum mechanics). Mechanics of large bodies would similarly be changed in 1905 with the arrival of Albert Einstein's (1905a) relativity theory. In this book, we will deal with only the first of these two great breakthroughs.