Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory

THIRTY YEARS THAT SHOOK PHYSICS

The Story of Quantum Theory

GEORGE GAMOW

Illustrations by the Author

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1966 by R. Igor Gamow.

All rights reserved.

This Dover edition, first published in 1985, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work first published by Doubleday & Co. Inc., New York, in 1966.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gamow, George, 1904–1968.

Thirty years that shook physics.

Reprint. Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1966.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Quantum theory. 2. Physics—History. I. Title.

QC174.12.G35 1985 530.1′2′09 85-6797

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-24895-0

ISBN-10: 0-486-24895-X

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

24895X15

www.doverpublications.com

TO THE FRIENDS OF MY YOUTH

L. Landau A. Bohr G. Gamow E. Bohr E. Teller

(Photographed probably by Dr. H. A. Casimir)     Copenhagen 1931

LIST OF PLATES

BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE

Thirty Years That Shook Physics displays Dr. Gamow’s artistic gift as well as his ability to expound science in the layman’s language. Dr. Gamow himself has acknowledged Sandro Botticelli as his master in portraiture, and for any art students who may happen upon this book it will make an interesting subsidiary exercise to find the Botticelli influence in the studies of Max Planck (page 6) and Niels Bohr (page 29). The further relation of Dr. Gamow’s style to the Pop Art of recent notoriety will be more readily apparent. The philosophically minded may find it significant that continuity in the stream of art from the Italian Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century’s Madison Avenue should be expressed in the works of a mathematical physicist celebrated for his development of the Big Bang theory of cosmic creation.

Even if they could write with comparable flavor and had equal mastery of the difficult science, few (if any) of today’s physicists could have produced a book like this one. It is a retrospective view of a crucial period of intellectual development, written by one who was there and who took active part. The great names you will find in the following pages were more than names to Dr. Gamow; these scientific giants, who remade the universe in man’s mind, were his teachers, his friends, and his colleagues. Because of the cosmopolitan circumstances of his life, it was his great good luck to have been among those in attendance at many of the momentous events of the thirty years that shook physics.

Dr. Gamow was born on March 4, 1904, in Odessa, Russia. In early youth he turned to science and spent a year studying paleontology. This experience, he said later, equipped him to tell a dinosaur from a cat by the shape of the little toes. He entered the University of Leningrad, from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1928, and spent a year at the University of Göttingen, in Germany, on a traveling fellowship. In 1928-29 he worked with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and in 1929–30 with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England.

Dr. Gamow was twenty-four when he made his first major contribution to physical theory. Concurrently, but independently, he, on the one hand, and the American physicist E. U. Condon and the British physicist R. W. Gurney, on the other, explained the emission of alpha-particles from radioactive atoms by applying to the process the then new methods of wave mechanics. Two years later, in 1930, he made the successful prediction that protons would be more useful than alpha-particles in the experiments popularly known as atomsmashing, and in the same year he suggested the liquid drop model for the nuclei of heavy elements. In 1929 he collaborated with R. Atkinson and F. Houtermans in formulating the theory that the sun’s heat and light resulted from thermonuclear processes, and his theory of the origin of chemical elements through neutron capture dominated cosmological thinking at one period in the 1940s. He also has contributed to the fundamentals of biology, having proposed that the four nucleotides of the DNA molecule compose a code whose different combinations act as templates in the organization of the various amino acid molecules.

Dr. Gamow’s personal characteristics are almost as formidable as his creative achievements. A giant, six feet three and well over 225 pounds, he is given to puckish humor, as readers of his Mr. Tompkins fantasies well know. When he and his student, R. Alpher, signed their names to the preliminary calculations of their paper, The Origin of Chemical Elements, in 1948, Gamow commented, Something is missing, and, crediting Hans Bethe in absentia, made the signature Alpher, Bethe and Gamow. He speaks six languages and is a frequent and popular lecturer with a heavily accented delivery that moved a friend to observe that the six languages were all different dialects of one language–Gamovian. Traces of Gamovian creep into his literary style from time to time, but the editor who would expunge them ruthlessly would be a pedant of the worst kind, insensitive to individual enrichment of the language.

Dr. Gamow’s ability as a linguist, however accented, reflects the ground he has covered in his professional career. After his studies with Bohr and Rutherford, he returned to Russia as Master in Research at the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad but left his native land for good in 1933. He lectured in Paris and London and at the University of Michigan summer school, then joined the faculty of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., where he was professor of physics from 1934 to 1956. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and acted as a Navy, Army, Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission consultant during and after World War II. Since 1956 he has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Dr. Gamow has written many technical papers and one technical book, Atomic Nucleus (Oxford University Press, 1931, revised 1937 and 1949). His popular writing includes numerous Scientific American articles and the following books:

Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, Cambridge University Press, 1939

Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom, Cambridge University Press, 1943

Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life, Cambridge University Press, 1953

Atomic Energy in Cosmic and Human Life, Cambridge University Press, 1945

The Birth and Death of the Sun, Viking Press, 1941

Biography of the Earth, Viking Press, 1943

One, Two, Three ... Infinity, Viking Press, 1947 Creation of the Universe, Viking Press, 1952

Puzzle-Math (with M. Stern), Viking Press, 1958

The Moon, H. Schuman, 1953

Matter, Earth and Sky, Prentice-Hall, 1958 (2nd Edition, 1965)

Physics: Foundation and Frontiers (with J. Cleveland), Prentice-Hall, 1960

Atom and Its Nucleus, Prentice-Hall, 1961

Biography of Physics, Harper and Brothers, 1961

A Star Called the Sun, Viking Press, 1965

A Planet Called the Earth, Viking Press, 1965

He took up illustrating for the second Mr. Tompkins book when World War II interrupted communication between him and the English artist who had worked with him on the earlier book of the series. In 1956 he received the Kalinga Prize from UNESCO for his popular interpretations of science for lay readers.

Dr. Gamow was a member of the Academy of Science of the U.S.S.R. until, as he says, he was fired after leaving Russia. He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

John H. Durston

PREFACE

Two great revolutionary theories changed the face of physics in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Theory of Relativity and the Quantum Theory. The former was essentially the creation of one man, Albert Einstein, and came in two installments: the Special Theory of Relativity, published in 1905, and the General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity called for radical changes in the classical Newtonian concept of space and time as two independent entities in the description of the physical world, and led to a unified four-dimensional world in which time is regarded as the fourth coordinate, though not quite equivalent to the three space coordinates. The Theory of Relativity introduced important changes in the treatment of the motion of electrons in an atom, the motion of planets in the solar system, and the motion of stellar galaxies in the universe.

The Quantum Theory, on the other hand, is the result of the creative work of several great scientists starting with Max Planck, who was the first to introduce into physics the notion of a quantum of energy. The theory went through many evolutionary stages and gives us today a deep insight into the structure of atoms and atomic nuclei as well as that of bodies of the sizes familiar to our everyday experience. As of today Quantum Theory is not yet completed, especially in its relation to the Theory of Relativity and the problem of elementary particles, being stalled (temporarily) by tremendous difficulties encountered on the way toward further development.

It is the development of the Quantum Theory that this book will discuss. The author was first introduced to the idea of quanta and Bohr’s atomic model at the age of eighteen when he enrolled as a student in the University of Leningrad, and later, at the age of twenty-four, he had the good luck to become Bohr’s student in Copenhagen. During those memorable years at paa Blegdamsvej (the address of Bohr’s Institute) he had the opportunity of meeting many scientists who contributed to the early development of the Quantum Theory, and of taking part in their discussions. The account that follows is an outgrowth of those experiences, centered on the great and lovable figure of Niels Bohr. The author hopes that the new generation of physicists will find some interesting information in the pages that follow.

January 1965

George Gamow

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The opening of the twentieth century heralded an unprecedented era of turnover and re-evaluation of the classical theory that had governed Physics since pre-Newtonian times. Speaking on December 14, 1900, at the meeting of the German Physical Society, Max Planck stated that paradoxes pestering the classical theory of the emission and absorption of light by material bodies could be removed if one assumed that radiant energy can exist only in the form of discrete packages. Planck called these packages light quanta. Five years later, Albert Einstein successfully applied the idea of light quanta to explain the empirical laws of photoelectric effect; that is, the emission of electrons from metallic surfaces irradiated by violet and ultraviolet light. Still later, Arthur Compton performed his classical experiment, which showed that the scattering of X-rays by free electrons followed the same law as the collision between two elastic spheres. Thus, within a few years the novel idea of quantization of radiant energy firmly established itself in both theoretical and experimental physics.

In the year 1913, a Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, extended Planck’s idea of quantization of radiant energy to the description of mechanical energy of electrons within an atom. Introducing specific quantization rules for the mechanical systems of atomic sizes, he achieved a logical interpretation of Ernest Rutherford’s planetary model of an atom, which rested on a solid experimental basis but on the other side stood in sharp contradiction to all the fundamental concepts of classical physics. Bohr calculated the energies of various discrete quantum states of atomic electrons and interpreted the emission of light as the ejection of a light quantum with energy equal to the energy difference between the initial and final quantum states of an atomic electron. With his calculations he was able to explain in great detail the spectral lines of hydrogen and heavier elements, a problem which for decades had mystified the spectroscopists. Bohr’s first paper on the quantum theory of the atom led to cataclysmic developments. Within a decade, due to the joint efforts of theoretical as well as experimental physicists of many lands, the optical, magnetic, and chemical properties of various atoms were understood in great detail. But as the years ran by, it became clearer and clearer that, successful as Bohr’s theory was, it was still not a final theory since it could not explain some things that were known about atoms. For example, it failed completely to describe the transition process of an electron from one quantum state to another, and there was no way of calculating the intensities of various lines in optical spectra.

In 1925, a French physicist, Louis de Broglie, published a paper in which he gave a quite unexpected interpretation of Bohr quantum orbits. According to de Broglie, the motion of each electron is governed by some mysterious pilot waves, whose propagation velocity and length depend on the velocity of the electron in question. Assuming that the length of these pilot waves is inversely proportional to the electron’s velocity, de Broglie could show that various quantum orbits in Bohr’s