Recovering Rational Science
Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism
by Carver A. Mead
Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England: MIT Press, 2000
(135 pages; $30.00, hardcover)
reviewed by David Haddon
The last seven decades ofthe twentieth century will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics.” With these opening words of his MIT monograph Collective Electrodynamics, California Institute of Technology professor Carver Mead throws down the gauntlet to loyalists of the Copenhagen School of quantum physics of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Mead, as one of the late twentieth century’s leading experimental physicists, bids to revitalize theoretical physics for the twenty-first century while incidentally purging it of the “formalism” and “irrationalism” of the Copenhagen School.
Sir Joseph John Thomson cracked open the door to the subatomic world when he discovered the electron in 1897, but this realm lacked a distinct name until after Max Planck reported in 1900 that, at the atomic level, matter heated until it glowed radiated energy in steps instead of continuously along a smooth curve as expected. He called the smallest step the quantum of energy, and because this constant proved to be so significant, the term quantum came to be applied to subatomic or quantum physics.
But it was not until the 1910s that the young Danish physicist Niels Bohr brilliantly used Planck’s quantum of energy in working out the “ladder” of energy levels of the one negatively charged electron that balances the positively charged proton of the hydrogen atom. He found that whole-number multiples of the quantum of energy matched the different energy levels of the electron in the hydrogen atom. When an electron fell to a lower energy level, the atom radiated a whole number of energy quanta as light, and when an atom absorbed a certain number of light quanta, an electron would jump to a higher level.
This stepped transfer of energy, along with the paradoxical results of experiments in which light and electrons sometimes did and sometimes did not form wave interference patterns, made it appear that light itself, as well as the electrons, sometimes acted like waves and sometimes like particles.1 In 1925 a young German associate of Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, worked out a statistical equation that predicted the wavelengths of the radiation from the atoms of different elements as they are observed in the light from the sun and stars. Using the quantum of energy, Heisenberg developed another equation that represented the limitation of precision (uncertainty) in simultaneously determining the momentum and the location of an electron.
Had Bohr and Heisenberg rested on these and their many other laurels, their legacy would not be so sharply challenged by scientists such as Mead today. But Bohr and the likeminded scientists associated with his lab in Copenhagen declared that the search for an understanding of the nature of matter had come to its limit with the observations suggesting that both light and matter (e.g., electrons) sometimes acted like waves and sometimes like particles. Bohr said that these two contradictory views of light and matter were complementary rather than mutually exclusive. He speculated that, at the atomic level, matter doesn’t have a definite existence as either a wave or a particle, but has only an Aristotelian potential existence. Heisenberg promoted his uncertainty equation into the Uncertainty Principle and denied not only the possibility of knowing the path of an electron between observations of it, but even that it had a definite path to know. In Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science,2 he frankly admitted that the logical law of noncontradiction had to be set aside in his statistical account of atomic entities.
The Triumph of the Copenhagen School
Albert Einstein challenged Heisenberg and Bohr’s interpretation as failing to provide a description of what happens to the atoms and electrons, but Bohr twice defeated Einstein in the eyes of the leading physicists of the era in public debate. Since then, Bohr’s Copenhagen School has dominated atomic physics. But with the dawn of the twenty-first century, Mead has renewed Einstein’s challenge, citing extensive experimental evidence of the exclusively wave nature of matter. Mead’s simple but revolutionary idea is that matter is not made of particles at all; it is entirely made of waves. This means that, contra Bohr, quantum physical reality is not an unintelligible contradiction but has a perfectly logical structure. As Einstein put it, “The Lord is subtle, but he is not malicious.”
Mead contends that Bohr’s contradictory, statistical approach to quantum physics arose from (1) his failure to break completely with a Newtonian model of the atom as a nucleus surrounded by point-particles like planets circling the sun, and (2) the crudity of the experimental apparatus available in the 1920s. Bohr clung to point-particles by introducing the contradictory duality of the Principle of Complementarity: The parts of the atom had to be viewed as both particles and waves and, hence, as neither one nor the other. Nevertheless, Bohr and Heisenberg’s statistical approach was effective enough to make many important predictions, and these successes helped make the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics plausible despite its abandonment of basic logic.
Even granting that cloud chambers, an apparatus used to observe the track of charged particles, are a relatively crude device, Mead may be unduly charitable in citing the experimental apparatus of the day as mitigating Bohr and Heisenberg’s quantum misinterpretations. Even cloud-chamber evidence suggests that an electron has a definite and continuous path in spacetime. Indeed, the direction of the curved path of the electron in an electric field depends on the strength and polarity of the field and can be predicted. In the face of this kind of evidence, Heisenberg nevertheless declared that his Uncertainty Principle meant that an electron doesn’t have a continuous path. In Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations,3 Heisenberg writes of cloud-chamber observations that “perhaps what we really observed was something much less [than the path of an electron]. Perhaps we merely saw a series of discrete and ill-defined spots through which the electron had passed.” This seems to be a classic example of imposing a preconceived hypothesis on the recalcitrant observations.
David Haddon is an author from Redding, California, who has written for InterVarsity Press and Baker Book House and whose articles have appeared in Christianity Today, National Review, and Learning. He holds a B.S. in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in politics and literature from the University of Dallas.
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