TELEPORTATION 57
in TVs. The electrons pass through a tiny hole, so normally you would
expect to see a tiny dot where the electrons hit the TV screen. Instead
you find concentric, wavelike rings, which you would expect if a wave
had passed through the hole, not a point particle.)
One day Schrôdinger gave a lecture on this curious phenomenon.
He was challenged by a fellow physicist, Peter Debye, who asked him:
If electrons are described by waves, then what is their wave equation?
Ever since Newton created the calculus, physicists had been able to
describe waves in terms of differential equations, so Schrôdinger took
Debye's question as a challenge to write down the differential equation
for electron waves. That month Schrôdinger went on vacation, and
when he came back he had that equation. So in the same way that
Maxwell before him had taken the force fields of Faraday and extracted
Maxwell's equations for light, Schrôdinger took the matter-waves of de
Broglie and extracted Schrodinger's equations for electrons.
(Historians of science have spent some effort trying to track down
precisely what Schrôdinger was doing when he discovered his celebrated equation that forever changed the landscape of modern physics
and chemistry. Apparently, Schrôdinger was a believer in free love and
would often be accompanied on vacation by his mistresses and his
wife. He even kept a detailed diary account of all his numerous lovers,
with elaborate codes concerning each encounter. Historians now believe that he was in the Villa Herwig in the Alps with one of his girlfriends the weekend that he discovered his equation.)
When Schrôdinger began to solve his equation for the hydrogen
atom, he found, much to his surprise, the precise energy levels of hydrogen that had been carefully catalogued by previous physicists. He
then realized that the old picture of the atom by Niels Bohr showing
electrons whizzing around the nucleus (which is used even today in
books and advertisements when trying to symbolize modern science)
was actually wrong. These orbits would have to be replaced by waves
surrounding the nucleus.
Schrodinger's work sent shock waves, as well, through the physics
community. Suddenly physicists were able to peer inside the atom itself, to examine in detail the waves that made up its electron shells,
in TVs. The electrons pass through a tiny hole, so normally you would
expect to see a tiny dot where the electrons hit the TV screen. Instead
you find concentric, wavelike rings, which you would expect if a wave
had passed through the hole, not a point particle.)
One day Schrôdinger gave a lecture on this curious phenomenon.
He was challenged by a fellow physicist, Peter Debye, who asked him:
If electrons are described by waves, then what is their wave equation?
Ever since Newton created the calculus, physicists had been able to
describe waves in terms of differential equations, so Schrôdinger took
Debye's question as a challenge to write down the differential equation
for electron waves. That month Schrôdinger went on vacation, and
when he came back he had that equation. So in the same way that
Maxwell before him had taken the force fields of Faraday and extracted
Maxwell's equations for light, Schrôdinger took the matter-waves of de
Broglie and extracted Schrodinger's equations for electrons.
(Historians of science have spent some effort trying to track down
precisely what Schrôdinger was doing when he discovered his celebrated equation that forever changed the landscape of modern physics
and chemistry. Apparently, Schrôdinger was a believer in free love and
would often be accompanied on vacation by his mistresses and his
wife. He even kept a detailed diary account of all his numerous lovers,
with elaborate codes concerning each encounter. Historians now believe that he was in the Villa Herwig in the Alps with one of his girlfriends the weekend that he discovered his equation.)
When Schrôdinger began to solve his equation for the hydrogen
atom, he found, much to his surprise, the precise energy levels of hydrogen that had been carefully catalogued by previous physicists. He
then realized that the old picture of the atom by Niels Bohr showing
electrons whizzing around the nucleus (which is used even today in
books and advertisements when trying to symbolize modern science)
was actually wrong. These orbits would have to be replaced by waves
surrounding the nucleus.
Schrodinger's work sent shock waves, as well, through the physics
community. Suddenly physicists were able to peer inside the atom itself, to examine in detail the waves that made up its electron shells,