Word: planck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
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...
...area of the nature of light, the conflict between light's wave and quantum nature was cited as another example of the clash between the traditional and the newly discovered. After Huygens' enunciation of his famous Principle, the whole question of light's nature and propagation appeared settled. But Planck's theory of the quant of light energy, as elaborated by Einstein, threw the classical conceptions into serious problems...
Finally, the atom's very shape and nature was at once elucidated and complicated by Rutherford's experiments and Bohr's subsequent theory of the hydrogen atom. The idea of agitated orbital states, defined in integral multiples of Planck's constant seriously contradicted the vision of classical mechanics
From one of West Germany's principal nuclear-research centers, the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Göttingen, came an unexpected rejoinder. Led by four Nobel Prizewinners-among them 77-year-old Otto Hahn, the first man to split the uranium atom-18 scientists proclaimed their "great worry" over Adenauer's proposal. One hydrogen bomb, they warned, could render the whole Ruhr Valley "uninhabitable." Worse yet, "the entire West German Republic could be rubbed out" by spreading radioactivity. The hooker: all 18 pledged themselves not to help the West German government...