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How the Quantum Was Forced on Physics

Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner

Published Jun 29, 2006• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Physics courses are rarely presented historically. The introductory course in quantum mechanics is the exception. For students to see why we accept a theory so violently in conflict with common sense, they must see how physicists were dragged from their nineteenth-century complacency by the brute facts observed in their laboratories.

DOI
10.1093/oso/9780195175592.003.0007

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Abstract Physics courses are rarely presented historically. The introductory course in quantum mechanics is the exception. For students to see why we accept a theory so violently in conflict with common sense, they must see how physicists were dragged from their nineteenth-century complacency by the brute facts observed in their laboratories.
reprinted in the British trade journal Physics World in 1990, three separate and 5 lengthy replies from establishment physicists were printed in subsequent issues. For outsiders, especially scientists who rely on physicist's theories in their own fields, this situation is disquieting. Moreover, many recall their introduction to quantum mechanics as a startling, if not shocking, experience. A molecular biologist related how he had started in theoretical physics but, after hearing the ideology of quantum mechanics, marched straight to the Reg­ istrar's office and switched fields. A colleague recalled how her undergraduate chemistry professor religiously entertained queries from the class - until one day he began with the words: "No questions will be permitted on today's lecture." The topic, of course, was quantum mechanics. My father, an organic chemist at a Midwestern university, also had to give that dreaded annual lecture. Around age 16, I picked up a little book he used to prepare and was perplexed by the author's tone, which seemed apologetic to the point of pleading. It was my first brush with the quantum theory. 6 Eventually, I went to graduate school in physics. By then I had acquired an historical bent, which developed out of an episode in my freshman year in college. To relieve the tedium of the introductory physics course, I set out to understand Einstein's theory of relativity (the so-called Special Theory of 1905, not the later and more difficult General Theory of 1915). This went badly at first.
Twentieth-Century Physics A century which has run less than a third of its course has already witnessed two great upheavals in physical science. These are associated with the words Relativity and Quanta, and have forced the physicist of to-day to view nature against a background of ideas which is very different from that of his nineteenth-century predecessor. The latter thought of nature as an assemblage of objects located in space and continually changing with the passage of time. It was something entirely detached from, and external to, himself; something which he could study and explore from a distance as the astronomer studies the surface of the sun through his telescope, or the explorer the desert from his aeroplane. He thought of the apparatus of his laboratory as the astronomer thinks of his telescope, or the explorer of his field-glass; it shewed him things which were there whether he looked at them or not, which had been there before the first man appeared on earth, and would still be there after the last man had been frozen to extinction. Finally he accepted a “common-sense” view of nature, believing that there was no great difference between appearance and reality; the possibility that things were not as they seemed might provide an admirable subject for a debating society of philosophers, but was of as little practical concern to the scientist as to the farm-labourer. Although he may not have realised it, this complex of beliefs constituted a philosophical creed in itself.