Thirty Years that Shook Physics

The Story of Quantum Theory

George Gamow

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486135168
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Quantum Theory

`Dr. Gamow, physicist and gifted writer, has sketched an intriguing portrait of the scientists and clashing ideas that made the quantum revolution.` — Christian Science Monitor
In 1900, German physicist Max Planck postulated that light, or radiant energy, can exist only in the form of discrete packages or quanta. This profound insight, along with Einstein's equally momentous theories of relativity, completely revolutionized man's view of matter, energy, and the nature of physics itself.
In this lucid layman's introduction to quantum theory, an eminent physicist and noted popularizer of science traces the development of quantum theory from the turn of the century to about 1930 — from Planck's seminal concept (still developing) to anti-particles, mesons, and Enrico Fermi's nuclear research. Gamow was not just a spectator at the theoretical breakthroughs which fundamentally altered our view of the universe, he was an active participant who made important contributions of his own. This `insider's` vantage point lends special validity to his careful, accessible explanations of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Niels Bohr's model of the atom, the pilot waves of Louis de Broglie and other path-breaking ideas.
In addition, Gamow recounts a wealth of revealing personal anecdotes which give a warm human dimension to many giants of 20th-century physics. He ends the book with the Blegdamsvej Faust, a delightful play written in 1932 by Niels Bohr's students and colleagues to satirize the epochal developments that were revolutionizing physics. This celebrated play is available only in this volume.
Written in a clear, lively style, and enhanced by 12 photographs (including candid shots of Rutherford, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Fermi, and others), Thirty Years that Shook Physics offers both scientists and laymen a highly readable introduction to the brilliant conceptions that helped unlock many secrets of energy and matter and laid the groundwork for future discoveries.

MANUSCRIPT AFTER: J. W. von Goethe

PRODUCED BY:

The Task Force of the “Institute for Theoretical Physics,” Copenhagen

Motto:

Not to criticize …

N. Bohr

PROLOGUE

Between Heaven and Hell

PREFATORY REMARKS

The early decades of the present century witnessed the heady development of the Quantum Theory of the atom, and during that era the roads of theoreticians of all nationalities led, not to Rome, but to Copenhagen, the home city of Niels Bohr, who was the first to formulate the correct atomic model. It became customary at the end of each spring conference at Blegdamsvej† 15 (the then street address of Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics) to produce a stunt pertaining to recent developments in physics. The 1932 conference, which coincided with the tenth anniversary of Bohr’s Institute, followed closely on the British physicist James Chadwick’s discovery of a new particle having the same mass as a proton but deprived of any electric charge. Chadwick called it the neutron, the name which is now familiar to anybody interested in nuclear physics and in what is called, somewhat incorrectly, “atomic energy.”

But there was some mixup in terminology. A few years earlier Wolfgang Pauli used the same name for a hypothetical particle which had no mass and no charge and was, in his opinion, necessary to explain the violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy observed experimentally in the processes of radioactive Beta-decay. “Pauli’s Neutron” was the subject of hot discussions among the physicists, but these discussions were exclusively oral or carried on by private correspondence, and the name was never “copyrighted” through appearance in any publication. Thus, when the discovery of Chadwick’s heavy neutron was announced in his 1932 paper in Nature, the name of Pauli’s weightless neutron had to be changed. Enrico Fermi proposed calling it the neutrino, which in Italian means a little neutron. In the following translation the name of Pauli’s “neutron” in the original text is changed to the present name “neutrino,” the existence of which had not at that time been demonstrated. Many physicists, especially Paul Ehrenfest, of Leiden, were very skeptical concerning Pauli’s hypothetical neutrino, and it was only in 1955 that its existence was indisputably proved by the experiments of Fred Reines and Cloyd Cowan, of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

The pages that follow are the script of a play that was written and performed by several pupils of Bohr and staged at the spring meeting in 1932. (The author of this book was unable to participate in the p...