By the 19th century, chemists had good experimental reasons to believe in the existence of atoms, and that there was a kind of atom for every chemical element.
In the early twentieth century, physicists began picking apart the structure of the atom, and by the 1920s had determined that atoms were themselves structures composed of smaller, “sub-atomic” particles: electrons, protons, and (the still-theoretical) neutrons. But the laws of physics on the sub-atomic level proved to be very different from our everyday experience of ordinary matter.
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This episode was the perfect way to honor and celebrate the life of the great Steven Weinberg, one of the 1979 Nobel Prize recipients who worked with unified weak and electromagnectic interactions (electroweak interaction). Prof. Weinberg died last friday in Austin, TX, and I’m pretty sure he would have liked to listen to this beautiful episode.
On an unrelated note: the square modulus of the wave function — not Schrödinger’s equation — can be interpreted as the probability density of the particle’s given positioning. Schrödinger’s equation, on the other hand, governs its behavior.
As always, thank you, Mark!
I’m aware of what you say about the Schrödinger equation, but I felt that was getting a little too deep in the weeds, so I fudged a little. It’s hard to discuss mathematics in an audio medium like podcasting, where you can’t show equations or graphs. But your comment here will help clarify the point for anyone interested enough in digging a little deeper.
It sure is hard to discuss most of the topics you talk about (this was a hard to understand century, after all). And yet, time and again you manage to do it perfectly. This episode was no exception: besides being lateral, my point was a tiny, little, microscopic detail (pun intended). Keep up the good work, Mark.
Great job, as usual. It’s a topic I’m versed in, but as hard as I try I don’t really “get” the physical meaning of the Schrödinger model. Let alone the Dirac modifications.
It’s all fairly esoteric, makes me wonder why it’s so present in the culture? Wave-particle duality. Heisenberg is referenced in Breaking Bad. Could be just the strangeness lending attention to itself.
There were other scientific breakthroughs emerging at the time. Plate tectonics. Goedel’s incompleteness theorem, a lot of psychological investigation into conditioning and Jungian woo, Banting’s discovery of insulin, Fleming’s discovery of penicilin, and the earliest experiments into television. I know it would be impossible to cover everything, but I can’t wait to hear what you’re creating.