And let us not forget the atom bomb, which in its own horrific way proclaims the stupendous magnitude of the quantum-mechanical breakthrough.

It was a period of unprecedented discovery, in which entirely new domains of inquiry and spheres of application came rapidly into view: think of the cyber revolution, to mention but one example, the foundations of which rest upon quantum theory. There was reason to believe that, in certain domains at least, physics had at last reached its ground level and was now conversant, not merely with epiphenomena, but with Nature’s fundamental laws. It did not take long, following the discovery of the Schrödinger wave equation, for the likes of Wolfgang Pauli to calculate these spectral frequencies to degrees of accuracy never before attained. The first enigma to be resolved was that of atomic spectra: those astounding sequences of spectral lines in the radiation emitted by atoms, which could be measured with uncanny precision and used to identify not only the chemical elements, but even their isotopes. In the wake of this mathematization of quantum theory, discovery succeeded discovery in its triumphant march.

The venerable mechanics of Newton - which for three centuries had been perceived as the master-key to the secrets of Nature - was now demoted to the status of an approximation, valid in the limit as the newly-discovered Planck’s constant h tends to zero. Meanwhile, in the fateful year 1925, the dynamics of these so-called quantum particles was successfully encoded in the famous Schrödinger wave equation, which extends the classical laws of motion into the newly-discovered quantum realm. At one stroke the mystery of the chemical elements, as enshrined in the periodic table, had now been resolved, reducing chemistry in principle to physics. This epochal breakthrough was followed in quick succession by the detection of protons and neutrons: the structure of the chemical elements was about to present itself to scientific view in the form of the now familiar atom, with its heavy and positively charged proton-neutron nucleus and light negatively charged electrons revolving around it in shells. Thomson’s discovery of the electron, the first so-called quantum particle to see the light of day. It began, if you will, in the year 1897 with J. That golden age, however, has proved to be short-lived. 10 April 2019 Cosmology, Particle Physics, Quantum TheoryĪ golden age of physics, one can see in retrospect, commenced around the year 1900: the dazzling era of quantum mechanics had begun.

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