Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
    The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
    The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
    Ebook221 pages2 hours

    The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

    By Werner Heisenberg

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The contributions of few contemporary scientists have been as far reaching in their effects as those of Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg. His matrix theory is one of the bases of modern quantum mechanics, while his "uncertainty principle" has altered our whole philosophy of science.
    In this classic, based on lectures delivered at the University of Chicago, Heisenberg presents a complete physical picture of quantum theory. He covers not only his own contributions, but also those of Bohr, Dirac, Bose, de Broglie, Fermi, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Somerfield, Rupp, ·Wilson, Germer, and others in a text written for the physical scientist who is not a specialist in quantum theory or in modern mathematics.
    Partial contents: introduction (theory and experiment, fundamental concepts); critique of physical concepts of the corpuscular theory (uncertainty relations and their illustration); critique of the physical concepts of the wave theory (uncertainty relations for waves, discussion of an actual measurement of the electromagnetic field); statistical interpretation of quantum theory (mathematical considerations, interference of probabilities, Bohr's complementarity); discussion of important experiments (C. T. R. Wilson, diffraction , Einstein-Rupp, emission, absorption and dispersion of radiation, interference and conservation laws, Compton effect, radiation fluctuation phenomena, relativistic formulation of the quantum theory).
    An 80-page appendix on the mathematical apparatus of the quantum theory is provided for the specialist.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateApr 15, 2013
    ISBN9780486318417
    The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

    Read more from Werner Heisenberg

    Related to The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

    Titles in the series (100)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Physics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?: The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

      Oct 29, 2015

      It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbi

      17 min read

    • Article

      The THEORY of EVERYTHING

      Jun 20, 2019

      The THEORY of EVERYTHING
      6 min read

    • Article

      How the Universe Remembers Information

      Feb 28, 2019

      It was one of the great missed connections of physics. In 1965 a particle theorist derived a formula for the collision of elementary particles. Twenty years later two gravitation theorists, using completely different techniques, derived a formula for

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Metaphysical Baggage of Physics: Lee Smolin argues that time is more fundamental than physical laws.

      Jan 30, 2014

      An issue on time would not be complete without a conversation with Lee Smolin. High school dropout, theoretical physicist, and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin’s life and work reflect many

      7 min read

    • Article

      Quantum Mechanics 101

      Dec 5, 2019

      Quantum Mechanics 101
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Math That Takes Newton Into the Quantum World

      Feb 28, 2019

      In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René Descartes laid the groundwork for this subject by taking a plane,

      9 min read

    • Article

      When Gravity Breaks Down

      Feb 15, 2019

      When Gravity Breaks Down
      5 min read

    • Article

      How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time

      Jan 24, 2019

      An Introduction to the Black Hole Institute Fittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first a

      6 min read

    • Article

      Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?

      Jun 8, 2017

      It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbi

      17 min read

    • Article

      A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics

      Mar 16, 2017

      Particle physicists had two nightmares before the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. The first was that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator would see precisely nothing. For if it did, it would likely be the last large accelerator

      18 min read

    • Article

      Is Quantum Physics Linked To Consciousness?

      Jan 16, 2021

      WHILE most of us have only heard about quantum physics by watching the Big Bang Theory, a week doing nuclear physics in matric led to a fascination for quantum physics – and whether it plays a role in the workings of the brain – for UKZN PhD student

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Admiral of the String Theory Wars: After a decade, Peter Woit still thinks string theory is a gory mess.

      May 7, 2015

      Watching Peter Woit lecture on quantum mechanics to a class at Columbia University—speaking softly, tapping out equations on a blackboard—it’s hard to imagine why a Harvard physicist once publicly compared him to a terrorist and called for his death.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Is It Time to Get Rid of Time?

      Sep 20, 2018

      Poets often think of time as a river, a free-flowing stream that carries us from the radiant morning of birth to the golden twilight of old age. It is the span that separates the delicate bud of spring from the lush flower of summer. Physicists think

      11 min read

    • Article

      Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute

      May 4, 2017

      Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness

      11 min read

    • Article

      Time Flows Toward Order

      Dec 2, 2020

      The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated with a great mystery and a bleak implication. The mystery is th

      9 min read

    • Article

      Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present

      Nov 30, 2017

      We’ve all heard it before: There’s no time like the present. Broadly speaking, of course, it means to “seize the opportunity right now,” or maybe in my case, to avoid procrastinating. From a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense. As hu

      4 min read

    • Article

      The End of Time

      Sep 6, 2018

      Carlo Rovelli, physicist and author of “The Order of Time,” writes: In the fundamental physics of the world, there is neither space nor time.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Physics Has Demoted Mass

      Nov 9, 2017

      You’re sitting here, reading this article. Maybe it’s a hard copy, or an e-book on a tablet computer or e-reader. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re reading it on, we can be reasonably sure it’s made of some kind of stuff: paper, card, plastic, perha

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Mystery of Time’s Arrow

      Apr 4, 2019

      As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become de

      9 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Rethink Space: Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them?

      Jan 14, 2016

      Space is brutally egalitarian. When you become separated from your lover, the two of you retain no tighter a physical connection than do two lumps of coal. In this way, space serves as the organizing principle of the natural world—the glue that binds

      26 min read

    • Article

      In Search of Time’s Origin: What happened before the Big Bang?

      Jan 9, 2014

      Rearrange the following words to tell a coherent life story: A man dies, later he gets married, and finally he is born. Thanks to our built-in temporal sense, it’s pretty straightforward: Tomb always follows womb, it’s never the other way around. Yet

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

    5/5

    2 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Carefully writen, any knowledge of quantum physics is not required but the reader needs be familiar with experimental techniques and skilled in mathematics.

    Book preview

    The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory - Werner Heisenberg

    INDEX

    CHAPTER I

    INTRODUCTORY

    § 1. THEORY AND EXPERIMENT

    The experiments of physics and their results can be described in the language of daily life. Thus if the physicist did not demand a theory to explain his results and could be content, say, with a description of the lines appearing on photographic plates, everything would be simple and there would be no need of an epistemological discussion. Difficulties arise only in the attempt to classify and synthesize the results, to establish the relation of cause and effect between them – in short, to construct a theory. This synthetic process has been applied not only to the results of scientific experiment, but, in the course of ages, also to the simplest experiences of daily life, and in this way all concepts have been formed. In the process, the solid ground of experimental proof has often been forsaken, and generalizations have been accepted uncritically, until finally contradictions between theory and experiment have become apparent. In order to avoid these contradictions, it seems necessary to demand that no concept enter a theory which has not been experimentally verified at least to the same degree of accuracy as the experiments to be explained by the theory. Unfortunately it is quite impossible to fulfil this requirement, since the commonest ideas and words would often be excluded. To avoid these insurmountable difficulties it is found advisable to introduce a great wealth of concepts into a physical theory, without attempting to justify them rigorously, and then to allow experiment to decide at what points a revision is necessary.

    Thus it was characteristic of the special theory of relativity that the concepts measuring rod and clock were subject to searching criticism in the light of experiment; it appeared that these ordinary concepts involved the tacit assumption that there exist (in principle, at least) signals that are propagated with an infinite velocity. When it became evident that such signals were not to be found in nature, the task of eliminating this tacit assumption from all logical deductions was undertaken, with the result that a consistent interpretation was found for facts which had seemed irreconcilable. A much more radical departure from the classical conception of the world was brought about by the general theory of relativity, in which only the concept of coincidence in space-time was accepted uncritically. According to this theory, ordinary language (i.e., classical concepts) is applicable only to the description of experiments in which both the gravitational constant and the reciprocal of the velocity of light may be regarded as negligibly small.

    Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfils the traditional requirements of science in so far as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and hence a clear formulation of the law of causality. This is the very point at which the difficulties of the quantum theory begin. In atomic physics, the concepts clock and measuring rod need no immediate consideration, for there is a large field of phenomena in which I/c is negligible. The concepts space-time coincidence and observation, on the other hand, do require a thorough revision. Particularly characteristic of the discussions to follow is the interaction between observer and object; in classical physical theories it has always been assumed either that this interaction is negligibly small, or else that its effect can be eliminated from the result by calculations based on control experiments. This assumption is not permissible in atomic physics; the interaction between observer and object causes uncontrollable and large changes in the system being observed, because of the discontinuous changes characteristic of atomic processes. The immediate consequence of this circumstance is that in general every experiment performed to determine some numerical quantity renders the knowledge of others illusory, since the uncontrollable perturbation of the observed system alters the values of previously determined quantities. If this perturbation be followed in its quantitative details, it appears that in many cases it is impossible to obtain an exact determination of the simultaneous values of two variables, but rather that there is a lower limit to the accuracy with which they can be known.¹

    The starting-point of the critique of the relativity theory was the postulate that there is no signal velocity greater than that of light. In a similar manner, this lower limit to the accuracy with which certain variables can be known simultaneously may be postulated as a law of nature (in the form of the so-called uncertainty relations) and made the starting-point of the critique which forms the subject matter of the following pages. These uncertainty relations give us that measure of freedom from the limitations of classical concepts which is necessary for a consistent description of atomic processes. The program of the following considerations will therefore be: first, to obtain a general survey of all concepts whose introduction is suggested by the atomic experiments; second, to limit the range of application of these concepts; and third, to show that the concepts thus limited, together with the mathematical formulation of quantum theory, form a self-consistent scheme.

    § 2. THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF QUANTUM THEORY

    The most important concepts of atomic physics can be induced from the following experiments:

    a) Wilson² photographs. – The α- and β-rays emitted by radioactive elements cause the condensation of minute droplets when allowed to pass through supersaturated water vapor. These drops are not distributed at random, but are arranged along definite tracks which, in the case of α-rays (Fig. 1), are nearly straight lines, in the case of β-rays, are irregularly curved. The existence of the tracks and their continuity show that the rays may appropriately be regarded as streams of minute particles moving at high speeds. As is well known, the mass and charge of these particles may be determined from the deflection of the rays by electric and magnetic fields.

    b) Diffraction of matter waves (Davisson and Germer;³ Thomson, ⁴ Rupp⁵). – After the conception of β-rays as streams of particles had remained unchallenged for more than fifteen years, another series of experiments was performed which indicated that they could be diffracted and were capable of interference as if they were waves. Typical of these experiments is that of G. P. Thomson, in which a narrow beam of artificial β-rays of moderate energy is passed through a thin foil of matter. The foil is composed of minute crystals oriented at random, but the atoms in each crystal are regularly arranged. A photographic plate receiving the emergent rays exhibits rings of blackening (Fig. 2), as though the rays were waves and were diffracted by the minute crystals. From the diameters of the rings and the structure of the crystals, the length of these waves may be determined and is found to be λ = h/mv, where m is the mass and v the velocity of the particles as determined by the above-mentioned experiments. Similar experiments were performed by Davisson and Germer, Kikuchi,⁶ and Rupp.

    FIG. 1. – Tracks of α-particles in Wilson Chamber

    FIG. 2. – Diffraction of electrons on passing through a thin foil of matter.

    c) The diffraction of X-rays. – The same dual interpretation is necessary in the case of light and electromagnetic radiation in general. After Newton’s objections to the wave theory of light had been refuted and the phenomena of interference explained by Fresnel, this theory dominated all others for many years, until Einstein⁷ pointed out that the experiments of Lenard on the photoelectric effect could only be explained by a corpuscular theory. He postulated that the momentum of the hypothetical particles was related to the wave-length of the radiation by the formula p = h/λ (cf. § 2b). The necessity for both interpretations is particularly clear in the case of X-rays: If a homogeneous beam of X-rays is passed through a crystalline mass, and the emergent rays received on a photographic plate (Fig. 3), the result is much like the result of G. P. Thomson’s experiment, and it may be concluded that X-rays are a form of wave motion, with a determinable wave-length.

    d) The Compton-Simon⁸ experiment. – When a beam of X-rays passes through supersaturated water vapor, it is scattered by the molecules. Secondary products of the scattering are the recoil electrons, which are apparently particles of considerable energy, since they form tracks of condensed droplets as do the β-rays. These tracks are not very long, however, and occur with random direction. They apparently originate within the region traversed by the primary X-ray beam. Other secondary products of the scattering are the photoelectrons, which again make themselves evident by longer tracks of condensed water droplets. Under suitable conditions these tracks originate at points outside the primary X-ray beam, but the two secondary products are not unrelated. If it be assumed that the X-ray beam consists of a stream of light-particles (photons) and that the scattering process is the collision of a photon with one of the electrons of the molecule, as a result of which the electron recoils in the observed direction, Einstein’s postulate regarding the energy and momentum of the photons enables the direction of the photon after the collision to be calculated. This photon then collides with a second molecule, and gives up its remaining energy to an electron (the photo-electron). This assumption has been quantitatively verified (Fig. 4).

    FIG. 3. – Diffraction of X-rays by MgO powder

    e) The collision experiments of Franck and Hertz.⁹ – When a beam of slow electrons with homogeneous velocity passes through a gas, the electronic current as function of the velocity changes discontinuously at certain values of the velocity (energy). The analysis of these experiments leads to the conclusion that the atoms in the gas can only assume discrete energy values (Bohr’s postulate). When the energy of the atom is known, one speaks of a stationary state of the atom. When the kinetic energy of the electron is too small to change the atom from its stationary state to a higher one, the electron makes only elastic collisions with the atoms, but when the kinetic energy suffices for excitation some electrons will transfer their energy to the atom, so the electronic current as a function of the velocity changes rapidly in the critical region. The concept of stationary states, which is suggested by these experiments, is the most direct expression of the discontinuity in all atomic processes.

    FIG. 4. – Photograph showing recoil electron and associated photo electron liberated by X-rays. The upper photograph is retouched.

    From these experiments it is seen that both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time – the two concepts are too

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1