The Intuition of Atoms

Abstract

In this chapter our story gets more complex in addition to taking a strange turn. The physical theories we’ve examined so far have all been at least amenable to visualization. In your mind’s eye you can see planets orbiting the sun, and you can draw them on paper. Even four-dimensional space-time can be visualized by analogy with two-dimensional representations. The representation of unseen phenomena through analogy with what we actually witness began to come into question with Einstein’s hypothesis in 1905 of a particle nature for light. But then there was the pleasing visual imagery in Bohr’s atomic theory of 1913 in which atoms emerge as minuscule solar systems. Soon after, the situation in atomic physics began to deteriorate, and visualization was abandoned, to be replaced by nonvisualizable mathematical formalisms. Heisenberg’s new quantum mechanics of 1925 is the nadir of visualization and intuition as the basis for a scientific theory. The passionate struggles that ensued between Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger culminated in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s complementarity, neither of which offers any visualization of atoms and electrons. Both call for new transformations in the concept of intuition and consequently in the meaning of terms such as “particle” and “wave” in the atomic domain.