The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics Read Online Free Page B

featured a young man flying via a levitation device strapped to his back. While rocket packs would be labeled “Buck Rogers stuff” (and levitating belts would soon be featured in Buck Rogers’s newspaper strip adventures), the cover of this issue of Amazing Stories actually illustrated E. E. Smith’s story “The Skylark of Space.” The cover depicts Dick Seaton, a scientist who is testing out a flying device that employs a newly discovered chemical. When an electrical current is passed through this substance, Element X, while it is in contact with copper, the “intra-atomic energy” of the copper is released, providing an energy source for a personal levitation belt, a spaceship (the Skylark of the title), or a handheld weapon firing “X-plosive bullets.”
    “The Skylark of Space” leaves vague the exact nature of the “intra-atomic energy” released by the copper when catalyzed by Element X and an electrical current. A rival scientist of Seaton’s puts it as follows: “Chemists have known for years that all matter contains enormous stores of intra-atomic energy, but have always considered it ‘bound’—that is, incapable of liberation. Seaton has liberated it.” As chemists certainly knew, even in 1928, how to release the energy stored in chemical bonds between atoms in molecules such as nitroglycerin or TNT, the vast amounts of intra-atomic energy liberated by Element X may refer to the conversion of mass into energy through Einstein’s relationship E = mc 2 . This seems likely; when a spaceship propelled by Element X is accidently set to full thrust, the resulting acceleration becomes so great that no one on board can move to the control board to decrease their speed and the ship stops its motion only when the copper supplies are exhausted. While illustrating Einstein’s principle of the interrelation between energy and mass, this scene contradicts the Special Theory of Relativity when it reveals that this uncontrolled acceleration has resulted in the ship traveling many times the speed of light. When Seaton wonders how this can be reconciled with Einstein’s famous work, his companion replies, “That is a theory, this measurement of distance is a fact, as you know from our tests.” Like any good scientist, Seaton agrees that observation is the final arbiter of correctness and concludes of Einstein, “That’s right. Another good theory gone to pot.”
    The scientists in “The Skylark of Space” should not be so quick to abandon Einstein, for their X-plosive bullets of intra-atomic energy provide confirmation of another of his theories. This application of Element X, as well as the ray guns wielded by Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and other heroes of the science fiction pulps and comic strips, is not too far from the mark, as reflected in the first quantum principle, at the top of this chapter. As proposed by Albert Einstein the same year he developed his Special Theory of Relativity, all light consists of “bullets,” that is, discrete packets of energy, termed “photons.”
    Now that we have the answers to quantum mechanics—what were the questions that called for these new physical principles? The ultraviolet catastrophe alluded to earlier concerned the brightness of the light emitted by an object as a function of temperature. Certain objects, such as graphite and coal dust, are black, as they absorb nearly all light that shines on them. In equilibrium, the light energy absorbed is balanced by light given off. The spectrum of light of such blackbodies, that is, how much light is emitted at a given frequency, depends only on how hot it is and is the same for metals, insulators, gases, liquids, or people if they are at the same temperature.
    The theory of electromagnetic waves, developed by James Clerk Maxwell in the second half of the nineteenth century, was able to account for the energy emitted by a glowing object at low frequencies, such as infrared light, but at higher frequencies (above