Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 5:44 pm Post subject: Bohr, Heisenberg and Schroedinger
The way that Schroedinger and Heisenberg changed science feels a lot easier to understand than how Bohr changed science. I thought that Heisenberg changed science by paying attention to the numbers and completely ignoring models (p.132) which seems like it relates back to the thought experiments that previous scientists used. For Schroedinger I would say that how he changed science has to do with his simplification of science and math (p.134). I feel like this changed science by allowing more people to access the theories and calculations which in turn would allow more people to be working on solving problems. I couldn't really figure out how Bohr changed science so I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys have to say.
I found most information on Bohr and how he affected the discipline of Science. He made a point that Science should have a purpose on page 124, which resonated with me most (totally effecting my definition of science!) It seems implied that what Scientists study should have purpose, but I think Bohr was the first of who we’ve read about so far. Bohr also disagreed that the laws of physics were set in stone (page 127) and that the universe was in fact NOT confined to a rigid set of rules. He also seemed to play a mediator between Heisenburg and Schrödinger, and even worked to describe light as both a particle and a wave. (Page 135)
Also, on page 137 Bohr explained that what we know and learn from our experiments is confined to our measuring tools and other technology we use. “What we know is not particles and waves but the equipment of our experiments and how that equipment changes in experimental use.”(Page 137) I don’t know if this is what Bohr means, but it seems to me he is talking about human error, in which case that would be a new idea in the scientific world, and later on the same page he explains that the solution to this problem is just to accept it. Did anyone else think this?
The only somewhat major thing I could find for Heisenberg was that came up with the uncertainty principle (page 136), which seemed to be similar to what Bohr was getting at on page 127, but with different reasoning.
Schrödinger was the most difficult for me to find anything on in the reading, but it was made clear that he simplified quantum mechanics calculations (page 134) but I still don’t really understand why that helped to prove the point of quantum physicists.
I think that Bohr changed the discipline of science through his way of thinking about physics. He found out that the difficulty in the real world is the medium, language. Bohr came to a conclusion that "physics concerns what we can [/i]say about nature" (pg 129) He dismissed the classic physicist thought in that the purpose of physics was to "find out how nature is" I liked how at the end, the Rutherford atom was tied back to his theory of physics.
Heisenberg seemed to take a mathematical take on science, especially when working with Bohr on the dualisms of the atomic theory. So, I think Heisenberg also showed that there are different methods one can use when approaching science and that the discipline has no definitive method of figuring things out.
Knaide I think you hit the nail on the head with Bohr, and I too highlighted those quotes. I think in terms of how he changed the discipline of science, his somewhat aggressive nature in challenging Schroedinger's concept to the point where he was forced to sickness and "take to the bed", along with challenging Heisenberg's uncertainty theory helped push physics forward. However, I think the conclusion he came to at the end with Complementarity sounds awfully similar to Heisenberg's uncertainty theory, and he should have gotten a little more credit for that I think.
Overall I got the sense that the competition between these scientists/physicists and other involved minds of the time helped shape new forms of disciplines for science, be it mathematical, statistical, modular or imaginative, and the advancing leaps away from classical "mechanical" physics were all progress. I'd like to believe that this is proof enough that the discipline of science HAS profoundly changed with this question of what is light, but I suppose scientists have been challenging eachother throughout the course of science-history and only when someone makes a preposterous breakthrough do we really see significant and lasting change that stumps the next group of big thinkers for a few decades.
the entire reading felt like a power play between the three ways of finding truth in science: Math, Experimentation, and Theories/models.
At first, the real accomplishment was getting all three to match up pg 122 nothing being more impressive "than a numerical agreement between theory and experiment."
but some people thought some were better than others, Heisenberg favored math, for example.
but at the end of the reading, you get a mind warp. Each principle both fules and relies on the other. Our theories determine our experiments that confirm our mathematics. It's a rock-paper-scissors type dynamic. They complete one another.
Ok so while reading, there were a lot of different people with different ideas, so i hope i keep these straight. Bohr worked mostly off of other scientists' work, but what he found influenced the discipline of science. on pg 123, it talks about Bohr's idea of "stationary states" in the atom, which lead to him turning to the wings of the spectral butterfly. The Balmer formula made everything clear to Bohr, on pg. 126 Bohr discovers the relationship between his orbiting electrons and the lined of the spectral light.
Heisenberg worked with matrix algebra to create quantum mechanics. This (discovery?) was changing the way certain things were viewed.
I feel that Schrödinger influenced the discipline of science in the most direct way. on pg 134, it basically says that his theory was the same structure as Heisenberg, but with different math. By Schrödinger using more straightforward mathematics, he simplified the calculations and made it more accessible and understandable.
I totally agree with Sonya. I believe that H and S and the major use of mathematics changed how science is practiced and how people view hit. It enables people to work things out for themselves if they want to. And it puts two and two together. (I feel like im repeating what Sonya said, sorry).
I can also so how Bohr helped change science but i am not sure how to articulate it. He wanted what he was doing to have a purpose. Kind of like historians what to study things that are important to the past, instead of what i had for lunch. Am I on the right track? I understand it more as an overview rather than specifics of how. Its my instinct that is telling me he changed it.
But at this point I think my brian is clogged. We have done so much in the last three weeks that i think my brian is trying to play catch up with what im taking in. So i may be totally wrong.
Overall I got the sense that the competition between these scientists/physicists and other involved minds of the time helped shape new forms of disciplines for science, be it mathematical, statistical, modular or imaginative, and the advancing leaps away from classical "mechanical" physics were all progress. I'd like to believe that this is proof enough that the discipline of science HAS profoundly changed with this question of what is light, but I suppose scientists have been challenging eachother throughout the course of science-history and only when someone makes a preposterous breakthrough do we really see significant and lasting change that stumps the next group of big thinkers for a few decades.
Yes! I totally agree with everything you were saying here Naya. I definitely feel like a lot of the new ideas that these scientists were bringing up and testing were brought on by each other and they built off eachother's ideas. Right now I'm sort of leaning towards saying that the search for "what is light" did not fundamentally change science. I might be misinterepreting and just picking out the parts that support my idea, but... like Naya said scientists have always been challenging each other to get to new discoveries. Naya also said that "when someone makes a preposterous breakthrough we see significant...change". I agree with this, but I don't feel like there were any preposterous breakthroughs in the quest for finding out about light.
Alright here are the main ideas I came away with in the reading...
What We Accept as Evidence:
-The most impressive thing to physicists (and i would say to a certain extent all scientists) is "a numerical agreement between experiment and theory" (122). We see here that what is accepted as evidence now revolves three aspects, numbers, empirical evidence, and theoretical models.
-Heisenberg proposes that there are "inherent limits to how precise events could be known... atomic events are inherently blurred, it is impossble to assemble complete information... predictions of the future can only be statistical" and the uncertainty principle was born. The knower cannot ever truly understand the known, and on an atomic level many things are unpredictable (maybe even random?). This is a huge change on how science was viewed... it places a cap on what humans can ever know.
Knower + Known (influencing each other)
This reading discussed the relationship between the knower and the known, and the influence that the knower has over the known in a way that was new for me. For instance, "Bohr's emotional preoccupations sensitized him to see previously unperceived regularities in the natural world" (128). Based off of this, science can't be the study of truths independent of men as I had been defining it, because men can influence or selectively perceive certain truths. Also, "idealized concepts we use in science must ultimately derive from common experiences of daily life" (129)
The Purpose of Science and Definitions:
-"it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is... physics concerns what we can say about nature" (129)
-An important distinction in the study of science (which I think Knaide touched on) is that Bohr preferred to use the phrase "regularities of the phenomena" rather than "law of nature" because to him science was "not a grand philosophical system of authoritarian command but simply a way... of asking questions of Nature" (129)
2) I don't really understand the physics, but from what I did grasp it seemed like Bohr was suggesting that electrons have free will. That's definitely something I want to investigate further
Things to think about...
-Free will (in atoms and people)
-I couldn't help myself but make a connection to microhistory when Bohr talks about the existence of opposing ideas that are both valid, and that in fact this contradicting "wholeness leads to clarity" (137). This is very similar to the tenet of microhistory that says collective truth is the best truth.
-Something that came up for me a lot in this reading was the idea of belief... sort of like the "shift of paradigm" concept we went over in class. Like how Einstein (a pretty smart dude) refused to accept the uncertainty principle. I think Einstein wanted to believe in a universe that isn't random, where god doesn't role the dice, but he also wanted to believe that humans are capable of understanding the universe. The thought that there are some things that are and always will be beyond our comprehension was heretical to Einstein, just as the ideas he had proposed years earlier were heretical to scientists then. If scientists want to believe certain things and we know that scientists have some power of their results what does this mean for science?
Hegel Connections:
-Bohr said about the Rutherford atom "we could not proceed at all in any other way than by radical change" (129)... a revolution mayhaps?
-"The I who thinks and the I who acts are different, mutually exclusive, but complementary abstractions of the self" (138) This resolved a conflict I've been considering between Hegel and Marx. Hegel thought that reality begins through human consciousness, and that ideas carry a creative force. But Marx thought that "we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive... we set out from real active men" (76). I think that in the quote I started with Bohr is reconciling these two ideas by saying that they are both right, and in fact that existence of one makes the other better, they complement each other.
-"Two concepts are complementary when one imposes limitations on the other" (138). I think Bohr's idea of "renunciation" is undeniably Hegelian. This is all about the battle between thesis and antithesis (two ideas that ought to be mutually exclusive) but with synthesis we understand that they can both exists, and we have greater knowledge now that we accept both
(sorry i know this ramble didn't address the topics directly but i had to get some of these ideas sorted out)
whoever asked about what bohr was saying in his man's instrument's things, he was talking about human error, but a different type, that which we are accustommed to. he's saying that this new area of study is very herd to detect and study wtih th einstruments we have because theseinstruments are based on the "classical" way of thinking about and experimetning with "truth." so the machines we use, thagt is the old way of working, like with experiemtning with light with the prism and the slits, will not suffice today, it's a type of human error, but error in their ways of dealing and working with what they are studying by using techniques made for the study of things that are dated by decades and centuries. this ties with bohrs problems with no being specific enough. he thinks these instrumens are only giving us an overview of what we are studying. which he DOES NOT APPROVE.
i also like how bohr said that the interlock of waves and particles are hard to combine because with OUR perceptions these are the words we have made and can live by. bohr is saying we miss alot qwith our definitions.
heisenberg was all like experimenty but also showed like the slight paradox with the experimenting of this subject, one cannot focus on one part of the particle without having to give up the study of anouther... which is sad cause all particales are diferent in their actions so you'll never meet anouther particle like that particle... eh just give it up and when you;r edone you just sing "never mind i'll find someone like you" and make yah feel better.
schroedinger was like this theory guy (as everyone has said so i don't know why i had to point it out) but his theories were just as awseom and truthfull as the mathematical and experimental work of the oters, it's just anouther brain space that he was using. and his thing about atoms being mad eof vibrating (waves) matter was awsome and and consistanty with math and what poepl had been sayign.
they advanced science by showing definitively the validity of the three types of thinking. so schroedingers theory could help with the math of heisinger which could then be used in experiemtns by bohr and back and around again. it all helps with the study of science. the reason it's so important now is that it was the study of light that really showed how interconnected and important each part of science was in answering questions. evident in how far they had gotten with the trouble sof th eatom.. i want to say more but i don't know what to say but i know it's there... i don't care what hegel or kant would say.
So, I just finished the reading, and before I read any posts and forget my point, I'm gunna throw out a definition of science... after I explain where I got it. I'm more of an Einstein thinker, for sure. His insistance on math and proof being the telling signs of acceptable science make sense logically based on my definition of science. But first, a quote! (speaking about particles/waves)
Quote:
"They could not be merged or resolved; they had to stand side by side in their seeming paradox and contradiction; but accepting that uncomfortably non-Aristotelian condition meant physics could know more than it otherwise knew." (137-
Woah, crazy stuff in there! Pretty Hegelian, too. Einstein had trouble accepting science unless he could get past the paradox, and the knower (physics) can only know the known! So much Hegel. Einstein wouldn't accept thesis and antithesis as science, he needed synthesis. Bohr and Schrodinger and everybody were all happy with thought experiment and observations as conflict, leading to synthesis. So, the difference between the three scientists is how they synthesize! Oh yeah, my definition of science.
Science is the provable synthesis of natural observations.
OK well Bree, you're the best. everything she said is great. Especially the Hegel stuff. To address your question, "What does this mean for science?," I think it means it's related to man. Which is so contradictory to what I said before. But the knower has so much control over the known and how we know it in science, it must be tied to man. Which messes with my definition, but I think it might be an interesting road to go down. (connecting science and man, that is) I have a question. What is the difference between science and man's connection, and man and history's connection?
Tess' "power play" idea is what I attempted to address before, with Einstein being math, and Schrodinger and Heisenberg being experiment/models.
Kate I'd love to hear more of your points for arguing 'no' to our light project.
What summarized Bohr's outlook on science was the second to last sentence on page 129 "...we had something from which we could no proceed at all in any way than by radical change." Because he aimed to understand quantum physics, proposed a new model of the atom and wanted to show "that events take place on the atomic scale" (127) and are 'quantized,' he changed the discipline of science. What Knaide talked about science having a point and not being too set in stone really made sense. "He was never a system builder" (p.128) and steered away from composing some system that answered everything. Bohr argued that physics was "asking questions of Nature" (p.129).
Heisenberg in my opinion took Bohr's ideas and applied mathermatics to them. Heisenberg wasn't quite comfortable with unmeasurable events (p.131) and unlike Bohr, believed in coming up wit systems to prove science (p. 132). With the help of his colleagues Heisenberg came up with the system he called quantum mechanics. With the success of his system, the two separate philosophies of Bohr and Heisenberg worked together to prove the same thing.
I think between Knaide and Sonya, they hit most of the points I got from the reading. Heisenberg and Schroedinger changed science based on their use of mathematics and combining science and math and simplifying the two changing the way people viewed it. Knaide was spot on about Bohr, and how he believed science should have a purpose. I didn't even think of that in terms of my definitions of science. I thought it was important how much Bohr challenged previous laws about physics that hadn't really been questioned before. I also completely agree with what Knaide said, "He also seemed to play a mediator between Heisenburg and Schrödinger, and even worked to describe light as both a particle and a wave. (Page 135)" I found this reading hard to understand because of how many different scientists were thrown around and how they were all connected and the explanation of all their beliefs and what they were accomplishing. I got lost multiple times and still don't entirely understand how this all fits together and progress from the others ideas. But because of everyone's posts and going over what I highlighted, I've been able to begin to wrap my mind around the main ideas of the three this is focusing on... I think.
I think this article basically showed how Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger all kept working off each others findings... They could not have found what they found without the other.
And about the project question... I am answering no because I dont think that these findings changed the discipline of science any more than any other new findings in science did.
well whatever our views on quantum mechanics, I think we can all agree on what a Bohr this reading was.
But all puns aside, I found this reading chock full of ideas. The reading felt like a more of a debate of what was Science's true purpose and methods than quantum mechanics.
Schrodinger furthered math in science, trying to further explain scientific theory by writing equations to prove ideas.
I am in agreement with Kate's points but I think that as quoted a couple times earlier, Bohr said physics is simply a way of asking questions of nature(129). Applied to Science, Science isn't the truth of natural world, but the truths we as humanity believe, to understand how the natural world works. "Physics concerns what we can say about nature". Any other people disagree with the change of science due to the search of "what is light"?[/b]
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