HSCI 224: Cline Reading Guide

Reading Guide:

B.L. Cline, Men Who Made A New Physics

Chapter:

Chapters 1-4:

4/5.	In early 1911, what was exceptional about Rutherford-Marsden's method?
6.	What does "Now I know what an atom looks like!" mean? How might Rutherford have displaced Marconi?
12.	Where, and with whom did Rutherford train, and why was that significant?
14.	What major discoveries did Rutherford, in at the start, make about radioactivity?
17/18.	What kind of picture does Cline paint of Rutherford at McGill?
18/19.	What are the ? and ? rays?
19.	What was Rutherford and Soddy's 1902 contribution to radioactivity?
20/21.	What was particularly disturbing about the laboratory door's position affecting the experiments on Thorium?
21/22.	Where do ? and ? particles come from?
22.	What does half-life mean?
25.	Did ER get his 1908 Nobel in physics?
26.	How does C. portray physics at Manchester, 1911-1914?
26.	And beyond Manchester? [indifference]
28.	Who was to change physicists' interest in atomic physics?
29.	What "impossibility" about the nuclear atom [or major anomaly of the nuclear theory] troubled Bohr?
31.	What is "black-body" radiation?
32.	Describe the ultraviolet catastrophe.
32.	Why didn't physicists see what assumption was causing the discrepancy between theory and experiment in both black-body radiation and, later, the nuclear atom? What was that assumption?
33.	What does Cline believe about the role of accident in the history of science?
34/41.	What about physics/thermodynamics appealed to Planck?
34.	When Planck grew up in Munich, and wanted to study physics, what did his university professor advise him about physics as a career?
40/46/47.	What characterizes the two most valuable periods of Planck's education?
41/42.	What are the first two laws of thermodynamics?
42/43& 48/49.	What is "entropy", and how does Clausius version differ from Boltzmann's?
44/45.	How did independent multiple discovery play a harsh role in P's early career?
45/46.	What accident played an unexpectedly favorable role in P's career?
48/49.	What major contribution did Boltzmann make to thermodynamics?
49.	How did P react to B's version of entropy?
51.	Would you say C. paints a picture of P. as obsessive-compulsive?
56.	What led P. to focus on the black body problem?
55.	What two novelties led Planck to his revolutionary discovery, announced in 1900?
56.	What, apart from quantization, or the idea that energy is not continuous, was most disturbing about Planck's hypothesis?
59.	How did Planck find what "lay behind his first formula?"
59.	Do you agree with Cline that in 1900 there wasn't any evidence that light might have particle like form?
60.	How large is 6.6 x 10-27 ergs, in everyday terms?
61.	What did Planck think of his own quantum hypothesis?
62.	Is Einstein's characterization of Planck representative of scientists in general?
62.	What discoveries between 1895 and 1898 made it easy to overlook Planck's 1900 work?

Chapter 5: "Albert Einstein: Work of 1905" [64-87]

67f.	What 3 major works of October 1905 did Einstein publish?
67.	Why was Einstein's paper on Brownian motion significant?
68.	What was the paradox of the photoelectric effect?
72-74.	What elements of Einstein's character does Cline find significant?
[74].	Raffeniert ist der Herr Gott, aber böshaft ist er nicht"
79.	What did the Michelson-Morley experiment mean to Einstein, according to Cline?
81.	How did Mach's critique of classical physics help Einstein?
82.	What is the primary idea of Einstein's special theory of relativity?
83.	What are the axioms of special relativity?
86.	What absolutes remained in physics after absolute space and time were banished?

Chapter 6: "Neils Bohr: Early Quantum Theory of the Atom" [88-102]

92.	Did many physicists in 1912 recognize Planck and Einstein's quantum hypothesis?
93.	What are line spectra of heated gases?
95/97.	How did philosophy help Bohr to approach the puzzles of quantum physics?
98/99.	With Balmer, where have we seen this sort of number magic [Pythagoreanism] before?
98/99.	What do the Balmer frequency formulae resemble? Were there other similar formulations?
99.	What insight did Bohr have about the Balmer formula?
101.	What does "quantum jump from orbit to orbit" mean?
103.	What something unexpected emerged from Bohr's quantization of orbital angular momentum?
106/107.	What did physicists think of Bohr's 1913 paper?

Chapter 7: "Niels Bohr: Early Days of Atomic Physics" [108-126]

110.	Did the Franck and Hertz 1914 paper on the ionization of Mercury at first support Bohr?
110/111.	What was Bohr's brilliant insight about the Franck-Hertz experiment [and how does that show what he thought of the relative merits of theory and experiment?], and on whose work did it crucially depend?
112.	Did Bohr's experiment succeed?
112.	Although Franck and Hertz were "wrong," they nonetheless won the Nobel in 1925. Does that seem appropriate?
114/115.	Describe Bohr's and others' shell model of the atom.
116.	What difficulties did Bohr's theories face?
118.	What, in terms of the limits of mechanics, do h and c signify?
120.	What was the special irony of Millikan's early research?
120/121.	What new major contribution did Einstein make in 1917 to quantum theory?
122.	Light spectra constituted a code to what?
123.	What statement from Oppenheimer illustrates the deep hold pragmatism has on Americans?
124/126.	Describe Bohr's Institute.
125.	What was the key technique for breaking the spectral code?

Chapter 8: "Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Bohr's Institute" [127-150]

127-134:	Describe the community of physicists in Copenhagen.
134.	Characterize Pauli's style.
139.	Zeeman effect?
140-141.	State the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and why it was important.
143.	The "Pauli Effect"?
144.	Characterize Heisenberg's style.

Chapter 9: "An Introduction to Modern Quantum Theory" [151-171]

152.	Does matter have a wavelike character?
154.	Do models have to be abandoned?
157.	"Every measurement of the atomic region must be inconclusive." True? Misleading?
159.	If "the electron is not a thing," what is it?
162.	When Newfield says we know because what is predicted "turns out to be so," what fallacy in reasoning does he perpetuate?
163.	Is classical mechanics a special case of quantum mechanics?
164.	Does quantum theory imply that there may not be a particular preceding cause for every event in nature?
165.	Quantum theory is to matter as Quantum electrodynamics is to ?
167.	What new kind of questions does quantum physics allow us to answer 170. Einstein's theory of relativity was deductive, while, the history of quantum theory shows it to have been ?

Chapter 10: "The Creation of Quantum Mechanics" [172-191]

176.	Where was the mathematical center of the world in 1905?
176/178.	What did Born, Jordan, and Heisenberg create in 1925?
179.	What unexpected development occurred in spring 1926?
181f.	What was deBroglie's one major contribution to physics?
182.	The Compton Effect?
184.	What serendipitous discovery confirmed deBroglie's hypothesis?
188f.	Dirac's contribution?
190.	What did the 3 theories come to be?
190.	What did Dirac contribute to Schrödinger's quantum theory?

Chapter 11: "Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" [192-218]

194.	What breaks cause-and-effect, or determinism?
195.	What goal had S. apparently reached?
198.	What did Bohr and Born show about Schrödinger's interpretation of his wave mechanics?
199.	What did Planck and Schrödinger think of quanta?
201.	[Sept 1926-Feb 1927] Bohr's and Heisenberg's objective?
206.	What is the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics?
211.	Bohr's Principle of Complementarity?

Chapter 12: "Albert Einstein: The General Theory of Relativity," [219-234]

221/222.	What more do we learn of Einstein's character?
224.	What motivated Einstein to develop general relativity?
224/226.	What coincidence struck Einstein as suspicious?
226.	In E;s theory, gravity wasn't a force, but?
228/229.	What 2 tests of E's theory does C. describe?
229ff.	What effects did E's general relativity theory have on the public?
	-Distinguish between the general and special theories of relativity.
	-What invariants [absolutes] remain in the General Theory?
	-Does either theory of relativity indicate that everything is relative?

Chapter 13: "The Debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein," [235-244]

235.	What is "the burning question"?
236.	What did Einstein refuse to accept?
237.	What intellectual pattern of dispute did Bohr and Einstein fall into each day at the 1927 Solvay conference?
238.	By what poetic justice did Bohr answer Einstein's 1930 fiendishly clever clock timed photon release Gedanken experiment?
240.	"Das Ding an sich." - what is the allure?

Chapter 14: "Afterward" [245-249]

The end of a Golden Age. The Revolutionaries Disband.

258-259. Read the anecdote.
Does Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics still hold?
What has been the fate of the 'hidden variable' theorists, those who, like Einstein, argue that the statistical formulation of quantum theory is a reflection of ignorance? (Such theorists claim that were we to know all the relevant variables [some remain 'hidden' from us], we could fashion a non-statistical, deterministic quantum theory.)

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