Word: quantum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week the physicists were herded into line too. The Literary Gazette published two loud blasts against leading Russian physicists. Professor Y. I. Frenkel, author of a book on atomic energy, was accused of "promulgating the quantum theory in the disguise of Marxist dialectical robes." Professors M. Markov and V. Svidersky were denounced for "idealistic and formalistic" conceptions in atomic theory which are "nothing but conceptions admitting the existence of a limit to knowledge...
Science & Soul-Wrestle. At Cambridge, he was "a complete failure in the lab" but a success at theory: "Quantum mechanics had just begun to come into existence. It was a very exciting time in physics. Anyone could just get in there and have fun." At Cambridge, Oppenheimer met some of the leaders in the fellowship of physics-such men as Max Born, Paul Dirac, and Niels Bohr ("It would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr...
...Born invited him to Göttingen, where he earned his Ph.D. (at 23) three weeks after enrolling. Oppenheimer's Ph.D. thesis was a brilliant paper on quantum mechanics: Zur Quantentheorie kontinuierlicher Spektren. After the oral exam, a colleague asked Physicist James Franck (now at the University of Chicago) how it had gone with Oppenheimer. Replied...
...range of a billion lightyears, could do much more than magnify nearby planets. The important work will be done with photographic negatives, some of them showing only faint lines or smudges. The astronomers will study them with microscopes, and interpret them in terms of atomic physics, relativity and quantum mechanics...
After unifying mathematics and logic, Whitehead moved out into bigger playgrounds. "Philosophy," he remarked, "asks the simple question, 'What is it all about?' " Modern science had introduced new, disturbing concepts like relativity and the quantum theory that never bothered 19th Century thinkers. One of the first and ablest philosophers of modern science, Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (1925) sought to catch up with these experimental and theoretical advances, and organize them. Whitehead deplored the current tendency to overemphasize observation and experiment ("Can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators, its prime ministers...