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Articles: My Thoughts | In quest of Infinity-06
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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When Bohr completed his theory of atoms, he found it simply did not work. It seemed pretty clear to Bohr that somehow, he had to bring in new ideas sparked off by the German physicist Max Planck. In 1900, Planck showed that unless one blessed light [and indeed all of electromagnetic radiation] with a quantum nature, there were many important facts concerning radiation that simply could not be explained. At that point, people simply knew that there was this quantum aspect out there but very little else.
And now when Bohr failed to explain atomic spectra using Newton’s classical mechanics and hit a roadblock, he reached out for his pipe and murmured, “Ah ha! When we are talking of spectra, we are dealing with light. Since light has a mysterious quantum aspect to it [that’s what Max Planck says], unless I somehow smuggle in this quantum aspect into my theory, it is not going to work!”
German Physicist Max Planck
Birth of Quantum Mechanics
Bohr did just that and in 1913, came out with his now famous Bohr model of the atom, and it was an instant breakthrough. Sure, Bohr’s model left a lot of things unexplained, but it certainly was a big leap forward. One thing led to another and by 1928, one had what is now called quantum mechanics – which has since become the standard grammar of physics at the microscopic level. Physicists said, “Listen, whatever it is that you deal with at microscopic distances, you better use quantum mechanics to do that.”
So where physicists were concerned, quantum mechanics became their new Veda, and the Rishis who discovered this were Erwin Schordinger of Austria, Werner Heisenberg of Germany and Paul Dirac of England. I should not forget Prince de Broglie of France who in 1924, preceding the trio just mentioned, made the radical suggestion that if light had a dual nature representing its quantum nature, then so does matter! In other words, not only radiation but matter too was quantum in nature, an aspect that reveals itself mostly on small scales of distance. That is why it was missed till the twentieth century.
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