Session X7: Invited Session: 100 Years of the Bohr Atom

Niels Bohr and the Third Quantum Revolution

In the history of science few developments can rival the discovery of quantum mechanics, with its series of abrupt leaps in unexpected directions stretching over a quarter century. The result was a new world, even more strange than any previously imagined subterranean (or in this case submicroscopic) kingdom. Niels Bohr made the third of these leaps (following Planck and Einstein) when he realized that still-new quantum ideas were essential to account for atomic structure: Rutherford had deduced, using entirely classical-physics principles, that the positive charge in an atom is contained in a very small kernel or nucleus. This made the atom an analogue to the solar system. Classical physics implied that negatively charged electrons losing energy to electromagnetic radiation would ``dive in'' to the nucleus in a very short time. The chemistry of such tiny atoms would be trivial, and the sizes of solids made from these atoms would be much too small. Bohr initially got out of this dilemma by postulating that the angular momentum of an electron orbiting about the nucleus is quantized in integer multiples of the reduced quantum constant $\hbar =$ h/2$\pi $. Solving for the energy of such an orbit in equilibrium immediately produces the famous Balmer formula for the frequencies of visible light radiated from hydrogen as an electron jumps from any particular orbit to another of lower energy. There remained mysteries requiring explanation or at least exploration, including two to be discussed here: 1. Rutherford used classical mechanics to compute the trajectory and hence the scattering angle of an $\alpha $ particle impinging on a small positively charged target. How could this be consistent with Bohr's quantization of particle orbits about the nucleus? 2. Bohr excluded for his integer multiples of $\hbar$ the value 0. How can one justify this exclusion, necessary to bar tiny atoms of the type mentioned earlier?   

Memories of Crisis: Bohr, Kuhn, and the Quantum Mechanical ``Revolution''

``The history of science, to my knowledge,'' wrote Thomas Kuhn, describing the years just prior to the development of matrix and wave mechanics, ``offers no equally clear, detailed, and cogent example of the creative functions of normal science and crisis.'' By 1924, most quantum theorists shared a sense that there was much wrong with all extant atomic models. Yet not all shared equally in the sense that the failure was either terribly surprising or particularly demoralizing. Not all agreed, that is, that a crisis for Bohr-like models was a crisis for quantum theory. This paper attempts to answer four questions: two about history, two about memory. First, which sub-groups of the quantum theoretical community saw themselves and their field in a state of crisis in the early 1920s? Second, why did they do so, and how was a sense of crisis related to their theoretical practices in physics? Third, do we regard the years before 1925 as a crisis because they were followed by the quantum mechanical revolution? And fourth, to reverse the last question, were we to call into the question the existence of a crisis (for some at least) does that make a subsequent revolution less revolutionary?   

What Is Complementarity?

Complementarity is Niels Bohr's most original contribution to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but there is widespread confusion about complementarity in the popular literature and even in some of the serious scholarly literature on Bohr. This talk provides a historically grounded guide to Bohr's own understanding of the doctrine, emphasizing the manner in which complementarity is deeply rooted in the physics of the quantum world, in particular the physics of entanglement, and is, therefore, not just an idiosyncratic philosophical addition. Among the more specific points to be made are that complementarity is not to be confused with wave-particle duality, that it is importantly different from Heisenberg's idea of observer-induced limitations on measurability, and that it is in no way an expression of a positivist philosophical project.