Word: maxwellian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...society. In a complicated little story about life & love in a Manhattan residence hotel for women, untypical Miss Maxwell plays herself (explaining her presence in the unswank Sherrington as her substitute for a vacation in the mountains), popping out brisk remarks, decanting an occasional drop of the Maxwellian philosophy, which undoubtedly seems headier after 2 a. m. On cocktail parties: "They're only given for people not good enough to be asked to dinner. And because of that they stay to dinner-and supper-and breakfast." On life, as passed on by her father: "Never ... be afraid, especially never...
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...
...different point of departure led to the solution presented last week. Maxwellian theory took no notice of the size of energy-radiating particles, handled them as mathematical points. By 1925 subatomic theory had reached such a stage that electrons (which Maxwell did not know existed) had to be considered as waves as well as corpuscles-hence as abstractions. Reduced to its simplest terms, Professor Bern's latest work elevates them to the status of physical entities. By introducing a symbol to represent the electron's radius, by investing the electron with the four Einsteinian dimensions of time & space...