100 Years of Quantum Physics: Rise of the Matrix (1925)
7 days ago
- #Werner Heisenberg
- #Quantum Mechanics
- #Matrix Mechanics
- Niels Bohr’s atom model by 1925 was a complex and inconsistent construction, combining Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization and Pauli’s exclusion principle.
- Werner Heisenberg, a brilliant young physicist, emerged as a key figure in addressing quantum theory’s shortcomings.
- Heisenberg’s academic journey included studies under Arnold Sommerfeld and Max Born, but he faced challenges, including a difficult doctoral exam with experimentalist Willy Wien.
- Heisenberg’s breakthrough came during a retreat to Helgoland, where he rejected electron orbits as unknowable and focused on measurable transition frequencies and intensities.
- Heisenberg’s 1925 paper introduced a new quantum theory based on transition amplitudes, eliminating the need for electron trajectories.
- Max Born and Pascual Jordan recognized matrix algebra in Heisenberg’s work, leading to the formalization of matrix mechanics.
- Paul Dirac connected Heisenberg’s commutator to classical Poisson brackets, further advancing quantum theory.
- Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan collaborated on a comprehensive paper extending matrix mechanics to multi-dimensional systems.
- Matrix mechanics faced competition from Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, but Bohr’s complementarity principle reconciled the two approaches.
- Key contributions to quantum mechanics included works by Pauli, Dirac, Mensing, and Oppenheimer, applying the new theory to atomic and molecular spectra.