Youth & Atoms

Naming three Nobel prizewinners in physics last week, the Swedish Academy of Science paid tribute to the ability of young men and the importance of small things. Oldest of the three prizemen is Dr. Erwin Schrodinger, 46, who shares this year's award with Dr. Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. Dr. Dirac is only 31, as is Dr. Werner Heisenberg, to whom went the belated 1932 award.* All three have been busy prying into the unimaginably small interior of the atom.

Eight years ago an astute French theorist named Louis de Broglie enlarged and vastly complicated the field of subatomic study by endowing orbital electrons with the properties of waves or pulsations. Erwin Schrodinger then began work which led to a potent development of this idea. He replaced the classical equations for electron motion with new differential equations similar to those which describe the wave motion which constitutes light and sound. Thus the atom is conceived as a positive nucleus wrapped in a throbbing field of negative electricity. To expound these ticklish ideas to U. S. scientists slim, smallish, pleasant-spoken Dr. Schrodinger journeyed to the U. S. few years ago, lectured at Caltech and other universities in excellent English. Born and educated in Vienna, he was professor of theoretical physics at Stuttgart and Zurich before joining the faculty of the University of Berlin in 1927. This year he is at Oxford, may stay there permanently because, according to friends, he dislikes the way things are going in the Fatherland. When he is not working he likes to ski, skate, swim, climb mountains.

Prizeman Werner Heisenberg of the University of Leipzig is a self-assured young German who enjoys his scientific prestige as much as he does playing the piano. His father is Professor of Medieval & Modern Greek at the University of Munich; an uncle is a Manhattan braid manufacturer. He has visited the U. S. twice, went home the first time by way of Japan. On one of his visits a Columbia physicist complimented him gracefully on the contrast between his youth and his achievements. Replied Dr. Heisenberg: "You know what they call the new physics in Germany? They call it the 'Boy Physics.' " Werner Heisenberg at 21 had distinguished himself by studies on the Zeeman effect (splitting of spectrum lines when light comes from an electromagnetic field). Independently of the de Broglie wave mechanics, he devised an abstruse mathematical description of electronic behavior which he called "matrix mechanics." He saw the necessity of a wave concept as well as anyone else, but he followed the Newtonian principle that hypotheses should be avoided. In the light of wave mechanics alone, electrons lost their individualities, melted into a continuous field of negative electricity. But there was strong experimental evidence of "discontinuity," of individuality. For example, single electrons made tracks which could be photographed. Thus the election became a dualistic enigma, dancing weirdly in n dimensions. It was about this dualist electron that Dr. Heisenberg postulated his famed Uncertainty Principle. The position or velocity of a given electron, he showed, might be determined, never both. Increased precision in one calculation simply magnified the error in the other. This principle of "Indeterminance," a violent blow to the old deterministic laws of Cause & Effect, went unchallenged until two months ago when another German, Professor Max Born, effected a reconciliation of quantum theory with the classical Maxwell equations--whereby, Professor Born claimed, the prediction of both velocity and position was made possible (TIME, Sept. 11).

Wave mechanics and matrix mechanics are different mathematical expressions of the same theory. A third description of electron behavior, which strengthened rather than contradicted the other two representations, was contributed by last week's third prizewinner, Cambridge University's brilliant young Dr. Dirac. Also, long before lightweight protons or "positrons" were experimentally observed by Caltech's Dr. Carl David Anderson (TIME, March 6), Dr. Dirac had declared such particles to be required by mathematical necessity. But this shy, angular youngster with small Wack eyes and small black mustache, already a big frog in the subatomic puddle, made his biggest splash three years ago when he declared the universe was a sea of negative electricity. Thus the nuclear protons of atoms were simply holes in the surrounding electronic field; matter was a honeycomb of nothingness in electrical space, and the traditional picture of matter and space was flipped upside down. When he heard Dr. Dirac's quiet exposition of this theory, mystical old Sir Oliver Lodge was so excited that he nearly wept.

*Many a prophet had picked Percy Williams Bridgman, Harvard mathematician and theoretical physicist, and Stratospherist Auguste Piccard, for the 1932 and 1933 awards respectively.

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