Maxwell-Quantum Theory

So darkly complex, so fabulously remote from the familiar things of human existence is science's probing into the fundamental secretae of the universe--of light, electricity, gravity, matter--that the language of physicists is becoming metaphysical. Efforts to fit new discoveries to demonstrable theory, or to perform the converse, simply pile paradox on paradox. While U. S. probers have been mostly content to spin new riddles by unearthing new facts in their laboratories, European physicists have tried more & more of late, by sheer sweat of mind, to coordinate, to reconcile, to reduce the areas of conflict among observed phenomena. Last week U. S. readers of the British scientific journal Nature were apprised of an important reconciliation which Professor Max Born, theoretical physicist of the University of Gottingen, had achieved by juggling mathematical symbols.

What Professor Born had done, it appeared, was to revise the equations of Scotland's brilliant James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) to accommodate the concepts of modern quantum theory. Clothing electrical phenomena in mathematical language, Maxwell discovered electromagnetic waves by inventing them out of his own head. He then correlated electromagnetic waves and light waves. But his equations were based on the assumption that these waves could represent any amount of radiant energy, depending on conditions at the source.

Along came Max Planck to knock this assumption into a cocked hat with his discovery of bundles and jumps. In 1900 Planck announced that radiant energy could only be propagated in tiny, indivisible bundles which he called quanta. Furthermore these bundles did not proceed through space continuously, but by jumps. It was not long before experimenters were finding this lumpiness and jerkiness everywhere. Albert Einstein used it to explain photoelectric action. Subatomic explorers found that atoms had only a fixed number of orbits in which their electrons might travel; that the electrons jumped from one orbit to another with emission or reception of energy exactly equaling one or more quanta.

The little symbol e representing a quantum began seriously to restrict the old free & easy mechanics. Nevertheless the work of reconciliation began. Denmark's Niels Bohr ingeniously yoked classical laws and quantum laws to predict the probable interorbital jumps of electrons. His famed Correspondence Principle was postulated in 1913, was later abandoned when it was found not to work for atoms having more than one electron.

Professor Born, long before last week, published results of his wrestling with the problem of retaining Maxwellian theory as a guide for what ought to happen under quantum conditions. But his equations incorporated the quantum mechanics only as a special restriction on the old laws, and they were such jungles of intricacy that encyclopedias did not bother to include them in discussions of his work.

A different point of departure led to the solution presented last week. Maxwellian theory took no notice of the size of energy-radiating particles, handled them as mathematical points. By 1925 subatomic theory had reached such a stage that electrons (which Maxwell did not know existed) had to be considered as waves as well as corpuscles--hence as abstractions. Reduced to its simplest terms, Professor Bern's latest work elevates them to the status of physical entities. By introducing a symbol to represent the electron's radius, by investing the electron with the four Einsteinian dimensions of time & space (which are handled symmetrically as four independent variables), Professor Born has made the old theory and the new lie down side by side in the same equation.

As a result, stated Professor Born, the positions and velocities of orbital electrons may now both be calculated. The Uncertainty Principle advanced six years ago by Professor Werner Heisenberg held that the position or velocity of a given electron might be observed, never both. It has been widely accepted by theorists ever since, was reiterated last June by Niels Bohr at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.*

Last week's announcement won instant acclaim. One acclaimer was Cambridge's Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac who, now only 31, three years ago startled his learned compatriots by declaring that nuclear protons were simply "holes" in the circumambient electronic field. "A major ad-ance!" cried Dr. Dirac.

Such great minds as Dr. Albert Einstein and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington have long pondered the possibility of a Maxwell-quantum equation. Dr. Einstein could have used it as part of his Unified Field Theory coordinating the laws of electromagnetism, gravity and, light, which he succeeded in expressing mathematically, only to discard the expression when flaws were detected. At first blush Professor Born's feat of cerebral acrobatics seems to hold real promise of help to Dr. Einstein in rebuilding the Unified Field Theory, to which he expects to devote the rest of his life.

Born 50 years ago in Breslau, Max Born was the first son of Professor Gustav Born, University of Breslau anatomy professor famed for pioneer experiments in grafting tadpoles, and of Margarete Kauffmann Born, sprig of a solidly established family of industrial weavers. At Gottingen he drank the intoxicating elixir distilled by the distinguished mathematicians Hilbert, Klein & Minkowski, was only 22 when Einstein's Relativity turned the universe topsy-turvy. Four years later, a teacher of theoretical physics, he was plunging along the labyrinths opened up by the master (his mathematical treatises include an exposition of Einstein theory), but with many a nostalgic glance over his shoulder at Maxwell and classical mathematics. Now a gentle, grey-haired, square-jawed Jew with a shuffling walk and a husky voice, dislodged from Goettingen by the Nazi revolt, he lives quietly in Zurich, Switzerland with his wife and children, has turned down a professorship offered in Belgrade.

*Professor Bohr's reiteration was in connection with his new theory of Complementarity--a dualistic doctrine of despair which holds that all phenomena have two aspects, like the convexity and concavity of a sphere, and that both aspects cannot be true at the same time.

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