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University of Chicago Press eBooks

6. Reception

Slobodan Perović

Published Jan 1, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Chapter 6 argues Bohr’s model was the final stage of the elaborate inductive-hypothetical process he gradually developed and reflected upon and shows how it extended into the community of physicists working on quantum phenomena at the time. The chapter explains why his novel hypothesis induced as the synthesis of broad novel evidence was widely accepted and yet bound to be perceived as counterintuitive by his contemporaries.

DOI
10.7208/chicago/9780226798479.003.0006

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University of Chicago Press eBooks•Jan 1, 2021•0 citations
Chapter 6 argues Bohr’s model was the final stage of the elaborate inductive-hypothetical process he gradually developed and reflected upon and shows how it extended into the community of physicists working on quantum phenomena at the time. The chapter explains why his novel hypothesis induced as the synthesis of broad novel evidence was widely accepted and yet bound to be perceived as counterintuitive by his contemporaries.
The chapter explicates the experimental context in which Bohr worked and offers an account of his gradually devised conceptual approach to experimental apparatus and research in physics at the most basic level. As it explains, two distinct stages in Bohr’s vision of physics provided the foundation for his main contributions to early quantum theory and quantum mechanics: the stage of inducing the basic lower-level hypotheses from experiments and the stage of inducing higher-level theoretical hypotheses via intermediary hypotheses. These stages were also apparent in his reflections on the practice of physics and his gradual development as a physicist.
From a historical point of view, a distinction can be drawn between ‘old quantum theory’ and the full quantum theory that we now use. Old quantum theory was in essence a patchwork, cobbled together by incorporating some quantum ideas into essentially classical physics. The work of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Sommerfeld can be bracketed as old quantum theory. This classification is not meant to undermine the tremendous achievement that old quantum theory represents, but simply to underline its standing as a stage on the way to a fully formed quantum theory, which emerged from the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, and Dirac. The development of the photon concept is a key example of a radically new idea gradually gaining acceptance. The process works via a growing realization that more and more things can be explained in the context of the photon model.
As Quine wrote in 1961, what strikes us in a paradox is its initial air of absurdity, which develops into a sort of psychological discomfort when we compare the conclusions of the reasoning with the apparently irrefutable arguments on which it is based. However, as he went on to observe, ‘More than once in history the discovery of paradox has been the occasion for major reconstruction at the foundations of thought’. Catastrophe may therefore lurk even in the most innocent-seeming of paradoxes and force us to recognize the arbitrary nature ‘of a buried premise or of some preconception previously reckoned as central to physical theory, to mathematics or to the thinking process’. More recently, ideas of this kind have been used to assert in general that the role of paradox in the growth of knowledge is to generate category switches and to construct new universes of discourse. It could also be argued that paradoxes constitute elements of the logic of discovery capable of amplifying and thus making intelligible the still obscure phases accompanying paradigm shifts. Paradoxes would thus represent points of accumulation for the tension created between a given system of conceptual representation and a theory or empirical discovery that violates it. Historians of science have tried different interpretative approaches in their attempts to unravel the thought process that was to lead Einstein in 1905 to the formulation of special relativity and the simultaneous demolition of the classical conception of space and time.