The Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry

Thus, they were able to preserve the most basic aspect of a scientific theory, namely its ability to make predictions, which can, in turn, be verified by experiment

In order for the information to be useful, we would like to be certain that the act of making one’s measurement on the system does not alter it to the extent that we are no longer dealing with the same system

The uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to make an exact determination of both the momentum and position of a particle no matter how accurately they are measured

The chemical properties of an atom are determined by the behaviour of its electrons, principally the outer electron, which interact electro-magnetically with the outer electrons of other atoms to form chemical bonds

An electron in an atom can therefore be defined by four quantum numbers, namely, n that determines the radius of its orbit, ℓ that determines its angular momentum or the eccentricity of its elliptical orbit, m that determines the orientation of its orbital plane and ms that determines the orientation of its spin.

Bohr’s theory was also unable to predict the polarization of the light radiated by the atom. (The polarization indicates in which direction the oscillating electric field of the photon is aligned)

Although Planck’s quantization of the energy of light did not violate any of the empirically observed facts of nature, the idea of the quantum violated the notions of classical physics held by his contemporaries. According to their way of thinking, most quantities including energy are continuous.
The first break they had known in this tradition of continuity was the discovery of the atom, which revealed that matter was discontinuous

amount of heat is not conserved and that the creation of heat requires work

From this vantage point it is easy to see how the force of friction operates. As the mountains of the rolling ball and the paper rub against each other the motion of the ball is interfered with and it slows down just as a ball rolling on a cobble stone road slows down faster than one rolling along a paved road

the surface area of the Earth, we would discover that this smooth piece of paper possessed mountains ten times the height of the Alps and canyons ten times deeper than the Grand Canyon