Word: quanta
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Only two undergraduates took Nat Sci 100, "The Nature of Certainty in Physical Experiments," for credit last Fall and Nat Sci 113, "Crystals, Quanta, and Electrons," has an enrollment of just 20 this Spring...
...David Bohr could have chosen no better age in which to live. By the time he was in college, physics was in fascinating chaos. Blow after blow had shattered its foundations: Albert Einstein proved that matter is energy, Max Planck proved that energy comes in indivisible packets he called quanta. Lord Rutherford proved that though the very name atom means "indivisible" in Greek, atoms are not indivisible. Nothing seemed certain. One physicist declared that all students should be warned: "Caution! Dangerous structure! Closed for reconstruction...
...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's meeting Dr. Max W. Lund of the Office of Naval Research took stock of man's abilities and compared them with those of machines. Man's sight and hearing are good, he said. The eye responds to as little as three or four quanta of light, and the ear can hear sounds only slightly louder than the ghostly rustle of air molecules clashing together. Both human sight and hearing apparatus, said Lund, are close to theoretical perfection within their class...
...continuous unity: gravity and electro-magnetism must, therefore, have a common source. He was in a minority, for Planck's famed Quantum Theory, which Einstein himself did so much to develop, and which many modern scientists accept, suggests that the physical universe is made up of small particles (quanta) that are governed not by some orderly causality but by chance...