5 Most Beautiful Images From the History of Quantum Mechanics
Images that tell the story of the most successful theory of physics
We have come a long way in the journey of our understanding of the universe and we still have ages to cover. Historically, the dawn of quantum mechanics started with Plank’s publication of the Black body radiation law in 1900. The beginning of this new development in the field of science, however, started with Democritus who was, arguably, the first person to state that matter is made up of extremely small indistinguishable particles. We now call them atoms. Theoretical predictions by several scientists over the past few decades and experimental analysis of the results at the Large Hadron Collider have provided us with great insights into the field of particle and nuclear physics. In this story, I shall share with you five images that I believe are significantly beautiful in terms of their historical depiction of the development of one of the most fascinating disciplines in modern physics, Quantum Mechanics. The images have been extracted from respective archives and collections the sources of which are provided alongside the respective images.
The First Solvay Conference
This is one of my favorite science images of all time. It shows a gathering of some of the most brilliant minds in the history of science from Madam Curie to Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein, the image has a separate fanbase. This 1911 image was the time when Quantum physics was almost a decade old and Albert Einstein was working on his theory of general relativity along with the theory of energy quanta.
Rutherford’s apparatus!
Ernest Rutherford is one of the most important names when it comes to the development of modern quantum mechanics. He was the first to propose the fact that atoms are basically centered concentrated positively charged nucleus, in 1911. He proved the idea with his alpha-particle scattering experiment. The image above shows his experiment table at Cavendish laboratory where he used to conduct many of his atom-splitting experiments.
The three Quantum Pioneers
Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger are the three pioneers of quantum mechanics, along with few others. Heisenberg provided the uncertainty principle and the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics which were crucial in further developments, Schrodinger provided the wave function Schrodinger equation which is foundational in quantum mechanics. Schrodinger’s equation in QM is like Newton’s law of motion in classical mechanics. Dirac was the founding father of quantum electrodynamics. The image shows the trio with their wives standing at Stockholm railway station.
De Broglie in the lab
Every matter particle has both particle and wave-like nature. The idea was first proposed by a French physicist Louis Victor de Broglie in 1924 which was later confirmed in two independent experiments during the mid-1920s. This proposition is called wave-particle duality and is one of the foundations of quantum mechanics. De Broglie won the 1929 Nobel prize for his works. The image above shows De Broglie in his Paris laboratory dating back to the same year when he proposed the hypothesis of the dual nature of light.
Planck and Einstein
While Max Planck started the foundational journey of the development of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein significantly led it further during the 1920s. His theory of electromagnetic waves as discrete packets of energy (energy quanta) led to the more generalized form of wavelength-momentum relation. In this image, Einstein is seen receiving a medal from Planck with his name on it.
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