Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2005 36th Meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics
Tuesday–Saturday, May 17–21, 2005; Lincoln, Nebraska
Session P2: Public Symposium for the World Year of Physics 2005: Einstein Centennial |
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Chair: Timothy Gay, University of Nebraska Room: Burnham Yates Conference Center Ballroom II |
Saturday, May 21, 2005 9:00AM - 9:36AM |
P2.00001: Einstein and 1905 Invited Speaker: From March 17 to September 29, 1905, just over six months, Einstein wrote five papers that shifted the tectonic foundations of physics and changed the face of Nature. Three of these papers, the March paper presenting the particle of light, the May paper on Brownian motion, and the June paper on the Special Theory of Relativity are universally recognized as fundamental; however, the Brownian motion paper cannot be divorced from Einstein's April paper, A New Determination of the Dimensions of Molecules, and the September paper that gave the world its most famous equation, E = mc$^{2}$, cannot be separated from the June paper. These five papers reveal characteristics of Einstein's approach to physics. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 21, 2005 9:36AM - 10:12AM |
P2.00002: Einstein's Revolutionary Light-Quantum Hypothesis Invited Speaker: The paper in which Albert Einstein proposed his light-quantum hypothesis was the only one of his great papers of 1905 that he himself termed ``revolutionary.'' Contrary to widespread belief, Einstein did not propose his light-quantum hypothesis ``to explain the photoelectric effect.'' Instead, he based his argument for light quanta on the statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, with the photoelectric effect being only one of three phenomena that he offered as possible experimental support for it. I will discuss Einstein's light-quantum hypothesis of 1905 and his introduction of the wave-particle duality in 1909 and then turn to the reception of his work on light quanta by his contemporaries. We will examine the reasons that prominent physicists advanced to reject Einstein's light-quantum hypothesis in succeeding years. Those physicists included Robert A. Millikan, even though he provided convincing experimental proof of the validity of Einstein's equation of the photoelectric effect in 1915. The turning point came after Arthur Holly Compton discovered the Compton effect in late 1922, but even then Compton's discovery was contested both on experimental and on theoretical grounds. Niels Bohr, in particular, had never accepted the reality of light quanta and now, in 1924, proposed a theory, the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory, which assumed that energy and momentum were conserved only statistically in microscopic interactions. Only after that theory was disproved experimentally in 1925 was Einstein's revolutionary light-quantum hypothesis generally accepted by physicists---a full two decades after Einstein had proposed it. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 21, 2005 10:12AM - 10:48AM |
P2.00003: Emergence and Interpretation of Lorentz Invariance Invited Speaker: In the course of his work on optics and electrodynamics in systems moving through the ether, the 19th-century medium for light waves and electric and magnetic fields, Lorentz discovered and exploited the invariance of the free-field Maxwell equations under what Poincar\'{e} later proposed to call Lorentz transformations. To account for the negative results of optical experiments aimed at detecting the earth's motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, assumed that the laws governing matter interacting with light waves are Lorentz invariant too. Like Lorentz, Einstein first encountered the Lorentz transformations in electrodynamics. Unlike Lorentz, however, for whom the transformation merely provided convenient mathematical substitutions, but like Poincar\'{e}, Einstein recognized that the Lorentz- transformed quantities are the measured quantities for the moving observer. More importantly, Einstein recognized that the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws had nothing to do with electrodynamics per se, but reflected the kinematics in a new relativistic space-time, to be named after Minkowski who worked out its geometry a few years later. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 21, 2005 10:48AM - 11:24AM |
P2.00004: Einstein, Bose and Bose-Einstein Statistics Invited Speaker: In June 1924, a relatively unknown Satyendra Nath Bose from Dacca, India, wrote a letter to Einstein beginning with ``Respected Sir, I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal. I am anxious to know what you think of it. You will see that I have ventured to deduce the coefficient 8$\pi \upsilon ^{2}$/c$^{3 }$in Planck's law independent of the classical electrodynamics, only assuming that the ultimate elementary regions in Phase-space have the content $h^{3}$. I do not know sufficient German to translate the paper. If you think the paper worth publication, I shall be grateful if you arrange for its publication in \textit{Zeitschrift f\"{u}r Physik.'' } Einstein did translate the article himself and got it published. He wrote to Ehrenfest: ``The Indian Bose has given a beautiful derivation of Planck's law, including the constant [i.e.8$\pi \upsilon ^{2}$/c$^{3}$].'' Einstein extended the ideas of Bose that implied, among other things, a \textit{new }statistics for the light-quanta to the molecules of an ideal gas and wrote to Ehrenfest, `from a certain temperature on, the molecules ``condense'' without attractive forces, that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there also some truth to it?' Abraham Pais has called Bose's paper ``the fourth and the last revolutionary papers of the old quantum theory.'' My paper will present the works of Bose and Einstein in their historical perspective and the eventual birth of the new quantum Bose-Einstein statistics. [Preview Abstract] |
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