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Articles: My Thoughts | In quest of Infinity-06
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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OK, so by 1930, physicists had a mechanics for describing the behaviour of moving charges right down to the quantum level. There was still some dust around that had to be cleared but physicists developed new interests and started becoming curious about the nature of the atomic nucleus. This opened up an entirely new vista that we now call nuclear physics. Thus, in a manner of speaking, the period 1930 to 1939 saw the rapid growth of nuclear physics, with quantum electrodynamics as developed by Dirac in 1928, put aside for the moment. Some people realised that Dirac’s quantum electrodynamics was incomplete but no one knew how to fix it. Besides, nuclear physics seemed so much more inviting!
1939, World War II broke out. America was not in the war yet, but Europe was in the thick of it. A good many European scientists of Jewish origin had fled from Germany and other countries under Hitler’s domination, and many of them took refuge in America. In 1939, Hahn and Meitner in Germany had discovered nuclear fission and while nuclear fission was good physics, physicists in France and European scientists who had taken refuge in America realised that fission could be made the basis for an entirely new type of bomb with unimaginable power of devastation.
That led to the secret atomic bomb project culminating in the development of the atomic bomb by America in early 1945. Meanwhile of course, America itself became involved in the war, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. In August 1945, two atoms bombs were dropped over Japan, and the destruction they produced left everyone stunned. Japan surrendered quickly and the war was over.
The mushroom cloud after the Atom bomb American soldiers marching...
Return of Quantum Electrodynamics
In America, physicists eagerly returned to their academic ivory tower and suddenly, quantum electrodynamics became very attractive. Some very precise experiments were performed, and those results simply could not be explained using the Dirac version of quantum electrodynamics [QED] which till then was thought to be the end all.
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