Word: quantum
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...around it." Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he pictured electrons as little red balls. But physicists have long since stopped trying to visualize the atom. As understood today the electron has become almost a dreamlike abstraction. It does not obey the laws of cause and effect. Nevertheless, even in quantum mechanics, the abstruse mathematics of the atom, the electron is assigned a constant electric charge, e, and a constant mass, m. Thus it becomes a charged particle of some sort...
Brilliant Physicist Ira Maximilian Freeman, who took his University of Chicago Ph.D. in 1928 when only 22, spends most of his time on abstruse equations of quantum theory. But Dr. Freeman is also a teacher (at Central College, Chicago), would like to explain science to the average citizen, dispel its "mysteries and marvels." In his latest book, Invitation to Experiment, published last week (Dutton; $2.50), he lures his readers into kitchen and bathroom, where they can dope out for themselves "the things that make the universe tick." With clever drawings and photographs, he simplifies molecular motion, gravitation, optics, everything...
Einstein's relativity, which burst on the world as a mathematical vision but which has accumulated many astronomical proofs through the years, explains mass, gravity, inertia, space and time, but not atoms and electric particles, which seem to perform in a bizarre, non-relativistic world of their own. Quantum mechanics, the mathematics of the atom, has developed apart from relativity. Physicists of broad beam feel, however, that this should...
Einstein once said he expected to devote the rest of his life to the search for a unified field theory which would bridge relativity and quantum mechanics, embrace all phenomena from the atom to the universe. Once he hit on a promising lead-a treatment of space as a double sheet with atomic particles as "bridges" connecting the sheets-but that ran into a dismal dead...
...Some physicists, among them myself, cannot believe that we must abandon, actually and forever, the idea of direct representation of physical reality in space and time; or that we must accept the view [supported by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics] that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance...