The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios Read Free Book Online Page A

perpetual motion 10 were dashed, the promise of rocket trips to the moon and beyond were affirmed in the science fiction pulps.
    Goddard was an early example of a prominent scientist whose research would inspire many science fiction tales and whose choice of field and research subject was, in turn, inspired by science fiction. In a fan letter sent to H. G. Wells, the sixteen-year-old Goddard extolled the influence that reading The War of the Worlds had on him, such that no more than a year later, he “decided that what might conservatively be called ‘high altitude research’ was the most fascinating problem in existence.” Goddard was not the first scientist, of course, to find a muse in science fiction. Hermann Oberth, the Transylvanian-born scientist who is considered the “father of modern rocketry,” had an encounter at age eleven with Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon that set the trajectory of his scientific career. Both Oberth and his pupil Wernher von Braun would serve as technical advisers for Woman in the Moon, a 1929 Fritz Lang science fiction motion picture that featured the first countdown to launch a rocket, in film or in the real world.
    Real science, as opposed to fiction, was also imparted in Science Wonder Stories ’ regular features “What Is Your Science Knowledge?,” “Science Questions and Answers,” and “Science News of the Month.” Here, in this latter section, a brief item entitled “Electron Found to Have Dual Character” read, in its entirety:
    G. P. Thompson, British scientist, has made a new discovery in the field of physics. He states that the electron acts like a flying particle and also behaves like a wave. He rolled gold, nickel, aluminum and other metals, each to about one-tenth the thickness of gold leaf, and shot electrons through them. After passing through the films the electrons came in contact with a photographic film, and were recorded as concentric circles and other circular patterns.
    If the magazine had contained a detailed description of the chemical composition of an actual antigravity shield, it would not have presented a more profound or revolutionary report than this brief blurb regarding the electron’s “dual character.”

    The second quantum principle listed at the top of this chapter states that, just as there is a particle aspect to light, there is a corresponding wavelike nature to matter. Unlike the case of the photoelectric effect in the last chapter, this strange symmetrical hypothesis about the nature of matter was not proposed in order to resolve a mysterious experimental observation that contradicted expectations of classical physical theory—but was suggested precisely because it was a strange symmetrical hypothesis.
    In 1923, Prince Louis de Broglie (yes, he actually was a French prince as well as a physicist), struck by the counterintuitive suggestion that light was comprised of corpuscular particles, proposed that there was a wave—originally termed a “pilot wave”—associated with the motion of real particles, such as electrons, protons, and atoms. De Broglie had an answer for why this “pilot wave” had not been previously observed—its wavelength varied inversely with the momentum of the moving object, so the larger the object (which is easier to observe), the smaller the wavelength of its pilot wave.
    How to test the proposal that there is a wave associated with the motion of matter? As mentioned in the last chapter, interference effects, such as when white light creates a spectrum of reflected colors from an oil slick suspended on a wet surface, are an excellent test of the existence of waves. To recap, when the thickness of the slick is exactly equal to specific fractions of a given color’s wavelength, the waves corresponding to this color reflected from the top and those that have traveled through the slick, bounced off the bottom, and passed again through the slick and exited from the top surface add together