Word: quantum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...must first park our emotions outside. Pacifists and militarists alike have indulged in a good deal of loose talk on the subject. Most pacifists are not sufficiently informed; their arguments and accusations frequently boil down to nothing more substantial than Sir Arthur Eddington's definition of the Quantum Theory -- i.e., "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." Most militarists are insincere...
Armed with this mighty number Sir Arthur started off on an important synthesis, which last week in Washington he exhibited on a blackboard. Relativity treats matter as mass; quantum theory treats it as waves of probability. Sir Arthur's new quadratic equation treats it as both. Three years ago Cambridge University's astute young Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, writing the most complete exposition of quantum theory in existence, saw "the relativistic formulation of the quantum mechanics" as a great problem which physicists would sooner or later have to tackle. What Sir Arthur showed last week seemed a good...
...Einstein. From his special theory (1905) and general theory (1915) spring a line of relativity logicians who include notably Max Born (currently a refugee from Nazi Germany) and Belgium's Abbe Georges Lemaitre. At the other end of theoretical analysis, Denmark's Niels Bohr has taken the quantum principle advanced by Germany's Max Planck and used it to describe the possible energy states of orbital electrons...
...showed, might be determined, never both. Increased precision in one calculation simply magnified the error in the other. This principle of "Indeterminance," a violent blow to the old deterministic laws of Cause & Effect, went unchallenged until two months ago when another German, Professor Max Born, effected a reconciliation of quantum theory with the classical Maxwell equations-whereby, Professor Born claimed, the prediction of both velocity and position was made possible (TIME, Sept...
...Menzel-Boyce report unmasks it as mostly oxygen in bizarre atomic metamorphoses. The normal oxygen atom has eight orbital electrons. Menzel & Boyce proceeded to imagine oxygen atoms in such a state of excitation that electrons could skip freely from one orbit to another. Such excited atoms, according to quantum theory, should have energy levels differing from each other by precise amounts. Drs. Menzel & Boyce expressed a number of these energy levels mathematically. Then (by extrapolation of the 43-year-old Rydberg method) they mathematically expressed the light-wave frequencies represented by the five mysterious spectrum lines. Last, they brought...