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Oxford University Press eBooks

Quantum mechanics

Grant A. D. Ritchie, Devinderjit Singh Sivia

Published Aug 17, 2000• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This chapter considers the birth of quantum theory, which marks another important event in the modernization of physics and chemistry as it facilitates explaining phenomena at an atomic scale. In a first step, the chapter provides an overview of several phenomena that have long been a source of controversies among scientists, namely the nature of light, the nature of matter, and the fact that the colour of solids heated in a furnace is determined by temperature rather than the make-up of the material. None of these could be adequately explained by classical mechanics. The chapter then discusses Planck’s quantum hypothesis, which provided a major breakthrough in this regard. Finally, it traces the formalization of quantum mechanics, which was required to enable its application to a wider range of problems.

DOI
10.1093/hesc/9780198503606.003.0003

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This chapter considers the birth of quantum theory, which marks another important event in the modernization of physics and chemistry as it facilitates explaining phenomena at an atomic scale. In a first step, the chapter provides an overview of several phenomena that have long been a source of controversies among scientists, namely the nature of light, the nature of matter, and the fact that the colour of solids heated in a furnace is determined by temperature rather than the make-up of the material. None of these could be adequately explained by classical mechanics. The chapter then discusses Planck’s quantum hypothesis, which provided a major breakthrough in this regard. Finally, it traces the formalization of quantum mechanics, which was required to enable its application to a wider range of problems.
Quantum mechanics is one of the great success stories of modern physics, making sense of the very small just as Einstein's theory of relativity made sense of the very large. But, for most students, the ideas that make quantum mechanics powerful can be confusing and counterintuitive. This volume in the Greenwood Guides to Great Ideas in Science series provides a history of quantum mechanics from the early breakthroughs of Planck and Einstein, at the beginning of the 20th century, to the present frontiers of quantum computing and quantum gravity. The approach is entirely non-technical, and is aimed at the general reader who may not have much mathematical background but who has a strong curiosity about some of the most important developments in modern science. Quantum Mechanics: A Historical Perspectivetraces the history of this powerful theory, including: ; The early discoveries by Max Planck and Albert Einstein regarding the quantization of radiation ; The early quantum theory, including Neils Bohr's theory of the atom ; The birth of modern quantum mechanics through the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, Dirac and others ; Applications of quantum mechanics in chemistry, nuclear physics, electronics, and many other areas ; Recent work in quantum computation and quantum information theory The book emphasizes the fact that despite the great success of quantum mechanics, many exciting intellectual frontiers remain open for further researchers to explore. It includes a glossary, a timeline, and a bibliography of accessible resources for further research.
This chapter presents the basic physical ideas that underpin the quantum theory. Historians place the beginnings of the quantum theory at 1900. That year Max Planck published his famous formula for the distribution of energy as a function of frequency in black-body radiation. Curiously, although radiation theory gave birth to quantum mechanics, the interaction of matter and electromagnetic radiation is a rather advanced topic in quantum mechanics and it took almost fifty years for an acceptable formulation to be achieved. One reason for this is that photons are quanta of the electromagnetic field, and the quantum theory of fields requires a relativistic treatment to be entirely successful. The corpuscular nature of light was only half of the input that gave birth to quantum mechanics. The other half concerns matter. Given that the discreteness of photons manifests itself during the emission and absorption process, it is not surprising to find that quantum oddities afflict the behaviour of material particles too.
This chapter traces the origins of quantum mechanics. The classical mechanics developed by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century is an extraordinarily successful theory for describing the motion of everyday objects and planets. However, late in the nineteenth century, scientists started to make observations that could not be explained by classical mechanics. They were forced to revise their entire conception of the nature of matter and replace classical mechanics by a theory that became known as quantum mechanics. The chapter begins by looking at energy quantization, considering black-body radiation, heat capacity, and atomic and molecular spectra. It then discusses wave–particle duality, which is the recognition that the concepts of particle and wave blend together.
The previous chapters contain many examples of the successful application of quantum mechanics to the solution of real physical problems. These represent only a small sample of the wide range of experimental results, spanning just about all areas of physics and chemistry and beyond, that have been successfully explained by quantum theory. So far at least, no quantum-mechanical prediction has been experimentally falsified. Despite these successes, however, many scientists have considered the basic conceptual framework of the subject to be unsatisfactory, and repeated attempts have been made to reinterpret quantum mechanics, or even replace it with a different theory whose philosophical and conceptual basis could be considered more acceptable. In the present chapter we shall explain the reasons for this dissatisfaction and outline some of the reinterpretations and alternative approaches that have been devised. Inevitably many of the questions that arise in this area are matters of opinion rather than fact and, for this reason, some physicists consider that they belong more properly to the realm of philosophy than of physics. However, the conceptual basis of quantum mechanics is so fundamental to our whole understanding of the nature of the physical universe that it should surely be important for physicists to understand the nature of the problems involved, if nothing else.1,2 16.1 THE CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS In this section we outline some of the main areas of difficulty with a view to more detailed discussion later in the chapter.
In this chapter, three problems whose resolution laid the foundation of quantum mechanics are discussed. First the pioneering work of Max Planck is described who explained the spectrum of light emitted from a so-called blackbody by making a bold ansatz that the energy associated with the oscillations of electrons comes in packets or quanta of energy. Second it is shown how Einstein invoked Planck’s hypothesis to explain the photoelectric effect by arguing that light should come in packets or quanta of energy and this energy should be proportional to the frequency. Electrons are emitted if the energy of the quantum of light, which has come to be known as a photon, is higher than a critical value. The third problem relates to the atomic structure of hydrogen. A full description is given of how Bohr applied a quantization condition to explain the emission of light at certain specific frequencies.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of quantum mechanics, which is a subject of central importance in chemistry, and is by nature a mathematical theory. The chemist's approach to the understanding of matter and its chemical transformations is to take a microscopic view, connecting experimental observation with the properties of constituent molecules. However, at the microscopic level, atoms, molecules, and their constituent particles do not obey the familiar laws of mechanics that pertain to the everyday macroscopic world. For example, the existence of molecular line spectra indicates that molecules can be found only at certain well-defined energies, unlike objects at our own scale whose energy appears to be continuously variable. This book aims to explain the fundamentals of quantum mechanics from the point of view of chemistry; describe the areas of chemistry where quantum mechanics is most important; and show how quantum mechanics is applied to chemical problems.