Always seeking harmony, man sees the universe—for a few brief moments—as a pleasingly simple machine. Then curiosity about the nature of matter gets the better of him. Democritus conceived matter as only a whirl of tiny, indivisible units called atoms. Plato disagreed, saw it as a symmetrical expression of mathematical relations between five basic structures. Then came the theory of light radiating in continuous waves. German Physicist Max Planck overturned that in 1900; he said energy comes in discontinuous particles—or quanta—and Einstein followed him with the idea that light can be thought of as both particle and wave.
Today's physicists, bursting open the atom's nucleus to find myriad minute particles, are right back where it all started. Using giant accelerators such as the Berkeley bevatron, they can measure the results of events inside the nucleus, but not all of it makes sense. Where is harmony?
Last week two impressive efforts toward the definitive statement of harmony were announced. In West Berlin, before a meeting of scientists that honored the late Max Planck's 100th birth date, German Physicist Werner Heisenberg, 56, reported that he is prepared to make "a suggestion for the basic equation of matter." In Manhattan, before a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, German-born Dr. John Grebe, 58, director of Dow Chemical Co.'s nuclear, research, proposed "a periodic table for fundamental particles" that might help "explain the material of the universe."
Uncertainty. Neither theory is anywhere near being tested. To avoid "sensation," Heisenberg will not even publicly release his equation until next month. But physicists look for much from Heisenberg, head of the famed Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, and often called Einstein's successor. In 1932 Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize for one of modern physics' key laws, "the uncertainty principle," which holds that subatomic events cannot be observed individually without changing them by the very act of observation.
Now Heisenberg reportedly proposes to add a third unit of measure to both Planck's constant ("the quantum of action'') and the fixed velocity of light, which Einstein used in formulating his Special Theory of Relativity, the structure of space and time. Said Heisenberg: "There must be still a third such natural unit of measurement which is conceived in present-day atomic physics as a length of the atomic order of magnitude—for example, the size of the diameter of simple atomic nuclei. The goal of atomic theory would be reached if one succeeded in stating a mathematical structure which does not contain any arbitrary constants besides these three natural units of measurement, and from which the various known elementary particles with their proportions can be derived."