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Erwin Schrodinger: On His Centennial
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13165 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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11 / 1987 |
3,443 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Motz
Lloyd Motz is professor emeritus at Columbia University and
its Rutherfurd Observatory. |
The years 1925 and 1926 were remarkable in the history of physics. Two seemingly contradictory theories, those of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics, were promulgated to unify the disparate aspects of theoretical atomic physics. At that time, this field consisted of a hodge-podge of arbitrary rules introduced to bridge the gap between continuous classical physics and discontinuous quantum physics. The Born-Heisenberg-Jordan paper (1925) replaced the continuity of classical physics, based on Newton's laws of continuous motion of a particle, with the discontinuity of matrix mechanics, which holds that the position of a particle is an ensemble of simultaneous positions--that is, a matrix of values. This ultimately led Werner Heisenberg to this famous uncertainty principle. In 1926 Erwin Schrodinger published his equally famous quantum wave equation of the electron, which seemingly brought continuity back into atomic theory without rejecting the quantum theory of violating it in any respect.
The profound changes and revolution that these developments made in physics and in our thinking, in general, are best revealed by comparing the continuity of classical physics with the discontinuity of quantum physics. Classical physics, as expressed in Isaac Newton's laws of motion and Michael Faraday's and James Clerk Maxwell's laws of electricity and magnetism, places no restriction on how accurately we can describe the unfolding of any series of events in nature from moment to moment. Thus it states that if a particle is moving along a path, we can at any moment in its history determine its exact position and velocity at any point in its path. Classical physics is thus completely continuous and deterministic in the sense that the classical laws of motion, if correct, would enable us to describe completely the past history and the future of a particle from knowledge of its present position and velocity. Quantum mechanics denies this because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which is the basis of quantum mechanics, states that we cannot know the position and velocity of a particle simultaneously. Thus, as far as our knowledge of it is concerned, it behaves discontinuously; we cannot pinpoint it from moment to moment. This fundamental uncertainty is built into matrix mechanics and wave mechanics.
Matrix And Wave
Since physicists at the time did not understand (from a physical point of view) either matrix mechanics or wave mechanics, they were completely puzzled by the success that each of these theories enjoyed in correctly predicting the behavior of an electron in an atom and in deducing the spectra produced by excited
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