90th Anniversary Issue: 1920s
Rise of quantum theory and other highlights, 1920–29
By Science News
Rise of quantum theory
Science News-Letter was born only a few years before the greatest scientific revolution since Newton, a revolution that transformed Niels Bohr’s “old quantum theory” of the atom into the modern understanding of quantum mechanics. Beginning in 1925, Werner Heisenberg (above), Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac and others created the math of physics’s future, culminating in Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. “It is as yet an impossible task to describe this theory in simple language,” Bertrand Russell wrote of quantum mechanics in a book excerpt appearing in Science News-Letter in 1928 (3/17/28, p. 168). In 1929, Science News-Letter wrote of “Heisenberg’s indetermination principle,” suggesting that it was “destined to revolutionize the ideas of the universe held by scientists and laymen to an even greater extent than Einstein’s relativity.” The article also suggested that “in the new idea that uncertainty rules the universe, dreamers and mystics will see the abode of their fancies” (4/27/29, p. 257). — Tom Siegfried