Word: quantum
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...author of the quantum theory lived long enough to see his discovery affect all branches of science and all human life. Last week Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, 89, one of history's greatest discoverers, died...
...universe.* Planck's constant enabled Einstein to conceive the "photon" (particle of radiation). It also made possible Niels Bohr's model of the atom. It turned up in spectroscopy, in the study of X rays, in electronics. Upon it is based the whole science of quantum (wave) mechanics...
Every time an honored theory is disproved or amended, science makes a little progress. For 20 years the Dirac theory of electron behavior has been the bible of wave (quantum) mechanics.* Last week Columbia University announced that two of its young scientists, Professor Willis Lamb, 34, and Robert Retherford, 35, had knocked a prop from under the Dirac theory. Their experiment, said Columbia's Nobel Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, revealed new facts which will be of "inestimable value in future research...
...Fish. Lewis sees no good reason to accept the modern dictum that "scientific" explanations are more authoritative than theological ones: "The old atomic theory is in physics what Pantheism is in religion-the normal, instinctive guess of the human mind, not utterly wrong, but needing correction. Christian theology, and quantum physics, are both, by comparison with the first guess, hard, complex, dry and repellent. The first shock of the object's real nature, breaking in on our spontaneous dreams of what that object ought to be, always has these characteristics. You must not expect Shrödinger...
Bohr stressed the curious paradoxes and blind alleys measuring the location and momentum of electrons by either the classical rules of mechanics or Planck's Quantum Theory. He concluded however, with an optimistic outlook towards future discovery...