So darkly complex, so fabulously remote from the familiar things of human existence is science's probing into the fundamental secretae of the universe—of light, electricity, gravity, matter—that the language of physicists is becoming metaphysical. Efforts to fit new discoveries to demonstrable theory, or to perform the converse, simply pile paradox on paradox. While U. S. probers have been mostly content to spin new riddles by unearthing new facts in their laboratories, European physicists have tried more & more of late, by sheer sweat of mind, to coordinate, to reconcile, to reduce the areas of conflict among observed phenomena. Last week U. S. readers of the British scientific journal Nature were apprised of an important reconciliation which Professor Max Born, theoretical physicist of the University of Gottingen, had achieved by juggling mathematical symbols.
What Professor Born had done, it appeared, was to revise the equations of Scotland's brilliant James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) to accommodate the concepts of modern quantum theory. Clothing electrical phenomena in mathematical language, Maxwell discovered electromagnetic waves by inventing them out of his own head. He then correlated electromagnetic waves and light waves. But his equations were based on the assumption that these waves could represent any amount of radiant energy, depending on conditions at the source.
Along came Max Planck to knock this assumption into a cocked hat with his discovery of bundles and jumps. In 1900 Planck announced that radiant energy could only be propagated in tiny, indivisible bundles which he called quanta. Furthermore these bundles did not proceed through space continuously, but by jumps. It was not long before experimenters were finding this lumpiness and jerkiness everywhere. Albert Einstein used it to explain photoelectric action. Subatomic explorers found that atoms had only a fixed number of orbits in which their electrons might travel; that the electrons jumped from one orbit to another with emission or reception of energy exactly equaling one or more quanta.
The little symbol e representing a quantum began seriously to restrict the old free & easy mechanics. Nevertheless the work of reconciliation began. Denmark's Niels Bohr ingeniously yoked classical laws and quantum laws to predict the probable interorbital jumps of electrons. His famed Correspondence Principle was postulated in 1913, was later abandoned when it was found not to work for atoms having more than one electron.
Professor Born, long before last week, published results of his wrestling with the problem of retaining Maxwellian theory as a guide for what ought to happen under quantum conditions. But his equations incorporated the quantum mechanics only as a special restriction on the old laws, and they were such jungles of intricacy that encyclopedias did not bother to include them in discussions of his work.