Word: quantas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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More than three years ago, Albert Einstein announced (in the third edition of his book, The Meaning of Relativity) that he had developed an overall theory to account for both gravitation and small-scale phenomena, such as the quanta of energy that are studied in atomic physics (TIME, Jan. 2, 1950). Hardly any theoretical physicists came to his support, though a "unified theory" is what many of them are looking for most eagerly...
Some of these links are already beginning to appear. Physics and psychology, for instance, were once miles apart, one dealing with a mechanistic universe made up of measurable and observable particles, the other with fleeting and intangible emotion. But in the world of quanta, the physicists have begun to believe that forces can be transmitted where no particles exist -on waves as fleeting, intangible and unpredictable as emotion itself. In the eyes of both physicists and psychologists, therefore, man and the universe are beginning to present a common problem: the study of forces that cannot be visualized and that follow...
...together instead of setting them farther apart? Last week, at New York University, a group of scholars drawn from five major campuses had a bold suggestion: a special course, called "the frontier of knowledge," that covers everything from plants to paleontology, from the stars to the "world of quanta...
...important, but Planck did not realize it. For years he worked to eliminate the frivolous jumps of energy. They refused to get out of the picture; when Planck made light flow smoothly, his equations would not work. At last he accepted the jumps as actually existing. He named them "quanta" and found that they vary in size with the frequency of the light. Then he wrote his famous equation. Said Planck: "One quantum of energy equals 'h' times the frequency of light...
Mighty Constant. To laymen "h" (Planck's constant) is a tiny number (.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 006 6 . . .), but it shook the scientific world. The little quanta of energy are the building stones of the universe, far more fundamental than big, clumsy atoms or even protons or electrons. Out of their discovery grew Einstein's relativity, including his historic proof, not then considered fraught with danger to civilization, that matter is equivalent to energy. Out of it grew Niels Bohr's description of the atom as a sort of sun surrounded by electron...