Abstract Although quantum theory had its origins in Albert Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect (for which, and not for relativity, he received the Nobel Prize), its indeterminacy was something Einstein could never accept. This was the origin of his famous assertion that the Lord does not play dice. If the Universe was ruled by chance, he said, he would rather be a croupier in a gambling casino than a physicist. Einstein [161] was not alone in his epistemological distaste. In 1913, two future winners of the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s then assistant, Otto Stern [6| and Max von Laue [112], while on a walk up the Utliberg near Zurich, shook hands on an oath, contemptuously dubbed by Wolfgang Pauli [25] the Utlischwur (an allusion to William Tell’s Rutlischwur—the oath that led to the union of the Swiss cantons): ‘If this nonsense of Bohr’s should in the end prove right we will leave physics.’ (They of course reneged.)
Abstract Although quantum theory had its origins in Albert Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect (for which, and not for relativity, he received the Nobel Prize), its indeterminacy was something Einstein could never accept. This was the origin of his famous assertion that the Lord does not play dice. If the Universe was ruled by chance, he said, he would rather be a croupier in a gambling casino than a physicist. Einstein [161] was not alone in his epistemological distaste. In 1913, two future winners of the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s then assistant, Otto Stern [6| and Max von Laue [112], while on a walk up the Utliberg near Zurich, shook hands on an oath, contemptuously dubbed by Wolfgang Pauli [25] the Utlischwur (an allusion to William Tell’s Rutlischwur—the oath that led to the union of the Swiss cantons): ‘If this nonsense of Bohr’s should in the end prove right we will leave physics.’ (They of course reneged.)
‘God’, said Albert Einstein, ‘does not play dice’. This famous remark by the author of the theory of relativity was not intended as an analysis of the recreational habits of a supreme being but expressed his reaction to the new scientific ideas, developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, which are now known as quantum physics. Before we can fully appreciate why one of the greatest scientists of modern times should have been led to make such a comment, we must first try to understand the context of scientific and philosophical thought that had become established by the end of the nineteenth century and what it was about the ‘new physics’ that presented such a radical challenge to this consensus. What is often thought of as the modern scientific age began in the sixteenth century, when Nicholas Copernicus proposed that the motion of the stars and planets should be described on the assumption that it is the sun, rather than the earth, which is the centre of the solar system. The opposition, not to say persecution, that this idea encountered from much of the establishment of that time is well known, but this was unable to prevent a revolution in thinking whose influence has continued to the present day. From that time on, the accepted test of scientific truth has increasingly been observation and experiment rather than religious or philosophical dogma.
‘God’, said Albert Einstein, ‘does not play dice’. This famous remark by the author of the theory of relativity was not intended as an analysis of the recreational habits of a supreme being but expressed his reaction to the new scientific ideas, developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, which are now known as quantum physics. Before we can fully appreciate why one of the greatest scientists of modern times should have been led to make such a comment, we must first try to understand the context of scientific and philosophical thought that had become established by the end of the nineteenth century and what it was about the ‘new physics’ that presented such a radical challenge to this consensus. What is often thought of as the modern scientific age began in the sixteenth century, when Nicholas Copernicus proposed that the motion of the stars and planets should be described on the assumption that it is the sun, rather than the earth, which is the centre of the solar system. The opposition, not to say persecution, that this idea encountered from the establishment of that time is well known, but this was unable to prevent a revolution in thinking whose influence has continued to the present day. From that time on, the accepted test of scientific truth has increasingly been observation and experiment rather than religious or philosophical dogma.
In 1903 the physicist Albert Michelson made an astonishing pronouncement. Confident of the advances made by the great physicists of the Victorian era, such as Lord Kelvin, James Clark Maxwell and Thomas Edison, he declared that ‘the most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote’.1 In so doing he followed what appeared to be a long-established tradition that eminent physicists should make bold and far-reaching statements on the nature of the universe and its physical laws.2 Unfortunately, Michelson’s timing could not be worse as early twentieth-century physicists were about to make a string of discoveries that would fundamentally alter our perceptions of the universe. The world as Michelson understood it was about to be turned on its head by the work of three men: Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Ernest Rutherford. The first, Planck, was a respected German physicist who had done work on entropy, but had done little to distinguish himself. Then in 1900 he developed his ‘quantum theory’ which posited that energy did not flow as a stream or wave as had been imagined before, but rather was carried by packets or quanta. This seemingly simple, yet deceptively complex, thesis was to have a profound effect upon our understanding of the physical universe. Planck’s thesis proved to be the foundation for the modern discipline of quantum physics, a discipline that first came to the attention of the wider public when in 1905 a young Swiss patents clerk called Albert Einstein wrote five papers for the Annalen der Physik. Three of these papers are widely accepted to be among the best in the history of physics and examined photoelectric effects by applying Planck’s new quantum theory, Brownian Motion and a ‘Special Theory of Relativity’. As Bill Bryson notes in his Short History of Nearly Everything, ‘the first won its author a Nobel Prize and explained the nature of light (and also helped make television possible among other things). The Second provided proof that atoms do indeed exist – a fact that had surprisingly, been in some dispute. The third merely changed the world’.3 Thus within two years of Michelson’s pronouncement much of our understanding of the physical universe had been turned on its head by this new development; but for Michelson worse was to follow. In 1895, a young South African named Ernest Rutherford had won a scholarship to the world famous Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. By 1911, Rutherford had become obsessed with the nature of atoms, the basic building blocks that form the constituent parts of the universe. That year he proposed his ‘theory of atomic nuclei’, which suggested that all the positive charge and most of the mass of an atom must be contained in a tiny nucleus at the atom’s centre, with the negatively charged electrons ‘in orbit’ about this nucleus. To prove his thesis Rutherford had to ‘split’ the atom to prove that he could release matter from this nucleus, something which he finally succeeded in doing in 1919 when he showed that by firing alpha-particles into nitrogen gas a small amount of hydrogen could be produced. In so doing he also established that energy could be released from the nucleus of an atom, thereby proving an essential part of Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity: the unification of energy and mass, usually represented by the famous equation E=mc2.4 With Rutherford providing the link between quantum theory and nuclear physics the Newtonian view of the universe, which was at the heart of Michelson’s beliefs, had been rewritten in less that 20 years.
One critic of Quantum Physics was, reportedly, Albert Einstein, to whom this quote is ascribed: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice”. In this booklet, criticisms towards some claims of some Nobel Prize Laureates in Physics, such as Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, Gerardus 't Hooft, are explained with detailed math.'s physical descriptions as to where these famous physicists were wrong. In Chapter 1 of this booklet it is shown that Maxwell's equations and Classic Physics, can explain some of the phenomena such as the Photoelectric Effect satisfyingly. In Chapter 2 it is explained that, though well encouraging, still taking the Nobel Prizes' money would be unethical and immoral, since that money was initially earned by the sale of dynamite which was also used, unfortunately, for killings. Justice would have been if that money would have been given to its victims or to their surviving families.
Abstract The nature of the Bohr–Einstein debate was framed long before our protagonists became engaged in it. Both were reformers, ready to embrace controversy and even absurdity in their theories. But where Einstein held fast to classical principles he considered sacrosanct, Bohr would cheerfully embrace their violent reworking or replacement. Einstein’s 1921 Nobel prize was awarded in 1922. He had entertained the absurd notion that light consists of ‘quanta’, endowing particle-like properties governed by a characteristic wave frequency. Bohr’s 1922 Nobel prize involved entertaining the absurd notion of quantum ‘jumps’ between atomic orbits driven entirely by chance. He defended the inconsistencies with vague wordplay, declaring the quantities defining the orbits as ‘symbolic’, and introduced a fuzzy demand called the ‘correspondence principle’. At appropriate limits, the value of a quantity should be the same whether calculated using classical or quantum rules. Few quantum physicists could make it work.
The turn of the XXth century witnessed a revolution in physics comparable to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the universal laws of mechanics and of gravitation three centuries earlier. The world required to be described in novel terms, as the immutable, deterministic view of our familiar universe had given way to a new world picture, one which featured chance, flux, and an incessant upsurge of waves of matter. Such a worldview was so radically new and counterintuitive that it gave rise to strong debates, to the effect that Albert Einstein himself tried to oppose it on the grounds that “God does not play dice”. In spite of the intense debates that accompanied its emergence, quantum mechanics quickly proved an incredibly efficacious new tool to understand and to predict a wide array of new phenomena. It was so successful that in no time it broke free from the environment of research labs to become part of daily life, making it possible, for example, to understand why some materials were conductors, while others were insulators. Along with it, came, too, the discovery of transistors, on which much of modern electronics rests. It also led to understand how novel materials known as superconductors allow the transport of electricity with no loss, thus paving the way for new developments in the fields of medical imagery or energy distribution. Other aspects of the quantum theory led to the development of atomic clocks of astounding accuracy, which would be wrong by no more than fifteen seconds, had they been set at the beginning of the universe. A hundred years later, at the turn of the XXIst century, Quantum mechanics has lost none of its astounding power. Contemporary research has undertaken the task of exploring its less immediately perceptible aspects. Groundbreaking developments have ensued, such as the teleportation of grains of light or the possibility, once predicted by the great physicist Richard Feynman, to build, one day, novel computers which, unlike the ones we are familiar with today, will be able to process innumerable numbers of operations in parallel. The Wright Colloquium will be for us the occasion to explore, in the company of five internationallyknown specialists in the field, some of the fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. We will appraise how efficiently quantum physics can describe our world, and confront its limitation when it is faced with the infinitely small (in relation to recent experiments carried out at the CERN) as with the incommensurably large scale of sidereal spaces. We will appreciate the extent to which quantum physics already has impacted our everyday lives, and evoke the way in which novel fields such as quantum computers and quantum information will entail profound changes in the future. The quantum adventure has only just begun! Monday 15 November 2010 - 18h30 Jochen Mannhart Center for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism, University of Augsburg, Germany Quantum Physics on the Scale of Daily Life Tuesday 16 November 2010 - 18h30 Wolfgang Ketterle Nobel Laureate 2001 (Physics), Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A. When freezing cold is not cold enough New forms of matter close to absolute zero temperature Wednesday 17 November 2010 - 18h30 David Gross Nobel Laureate 2004 (Physics), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa-Barbara, U.S.A. Quantum Mechanics of the Very, Very Small and the Very, Very Large Thursday 18 November 2010 - 18h30 Alain Aspect CNRS senior scientist and Professor Institut d'Optique and Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, France. From Einstein’s intuition to quantum bits: a new quantum age? Vendredi 19 novembre 2010 - 18h30 Rainer Blatt Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Innsbruck, Austria The Quantum Way of Doing Computations