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CRC Press eBooks

From Classical to Quantum Physics

L. Piccirillo

Published Jul 25, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

There is a story, not verified 1 , that Lord Kelvin has claimed, quite boldly around the year 1890, that all the physics was practically known and what was left to do was to refine the values of the measured fundamental constants. This statement was enunciated to celebrate the success of what we call today “classical mechanics” and it is nowhere to be found in any lectures or writings of Kelvin 2 .

DOI
10.1201/9781003145561-3

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All the Rest of Classical Physics

Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner

Abstract Six years after Kelvin made this claim, he hedged: “Physics is essentially complete: There are just two dark clouds on the horizon.” He picked the right clouds: One hid relativity; the other, quantum mechanics. But before we look behind those clouds, we tell a bit more of the nineteenth-century physics we today call “classical.” We will describe the phenomenon of “interference,” which demonstrates something to be a widely extended wave. We will need the concept of electric field. Light is a rapidly varying electric field, and it is with light that the quantum enigma first arose. We will also talk of energy and its “conservation,” its unchanging totality. And we will briefly tell of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Its well-confirmed but hard-to-believe predictions are good psychological practice for the “impossible-to-believe” implications of quantum theory. There’s somewhat more in this chapter than you actually need to know in order to understand the quantum enigma. But it’s good background.

•Jun 29, 2006•0 citations

Early History of Quantum Mechanics

Springer eBooks•Dec 12, 2005•0 citations
There is a story, not verified 1 , that Lord Kelvin has claimed, quite boldly around the year 1890, that all the physics was practically known and what was left to do was to refine the values of the measured fundamental constants. This statement was enunciated to celebrate the success of what we call today “classical mechanics” and it is nowhere to be found in any lectures or writings of Kelvin 2 .
On April 27, 1900, William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, delivered a visionary speech before the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In it, he presented two unresolved problems which, to him, appeared fundamental and unavoidable at the turn of the 20th century. He compared them to two clouds obscuring our understanding of physics. Dissipating these two clouds would eventually require the development of special relativity and quantum mechanics. This article revisits the second cloud which, contrary to what is often claimed in the literature, did not concern black-body radiation, but rather the specific heat of polyatomic molecules. To clarify this, the article aims to place Kelvin's speech within the historical context of the time and to situate it within the sequence of developments, from Kirchhoff to the first Solvay Conference in 1911, that marked the path of the extraordinary intellectual adventure that led to the birth of quantum mechanics. It will also be shown that Max Planck's initial motivation was not to solve the problem of the so-called "ultraviolet catastrophe."
Classical physics Quantum theory was produced roughly between 1900 and 1925; it changed our view of the Universe in a revolutionary way. Such is the central preoccupation of this book. Relativity was another revolutionary theory produced between 1905 and 1916; it is less central here. The clear implication of these statements is that, prior to 1900, there was an established body of theory that was widely successful and was thought to provide final answers to fundamental physical questions. This body of theory is known as classical physics . The above is a simplified account of the development of physics over the last few hundred years. There is a good deal of truth in it. By 1900, Newton's Laws of mechanics had been established for over 200 years; they had been overwhelmingly successful in describing a huge range of phenomena, both terrestrial and in the solar system. They were held to be among the greatest human achievements, indeed the very greatest strictly scientific achievement, and practically a direct revelation of divine intent, and by 1900 it seemed unthinkable that they could be challenged. The same could not quite be said of electromagnetism, an area of physics that encompasses electricity, magnetism and, as will be seen later in this chapter, optics. By 1900, what we now take to be the complete and final theory of classical electromagnetism , that of James Clerk Maxwell, was over 30 years old, and the discovery of radio waves by Heinrich Hertz which was acknowledged to confirm the theory, more than ten years old.
Abstract Six years after Kelvin made this claim, he hedged: “Physics is essentially complete: There are just two dark clouds on the horizon.” He picked the right clouds: One hid relativity; the other, quantum mechanics. But before we look behind those clouds, we tell a bit more of the nineteenth-century physics we today call “classical.” We will describe the phenomenon of “interference,” which demonstrates something to be a widely extended wave. We will need the concept of electric field. Light is a rapidly varying electric field, and it is with light that the quantum enigma first arose. We will also talk of energy and its “conservation,” its unchanging totality. And we will briefly tell of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Its well-confirmed but hard-to-believe predictions are good psychological practice for the “impossible-to-believe” implications of quantum theory. There’s somewhat more in this chapter than you actually need to know in order to understand the quantum enigma. But it’s good background.