Manjit Kumar - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

THE MEETING OF MINDS

Paul Ehrenfest was in tears. He had made his decision. Soon he would attend the week-long gathering where many of those responsible for the quantum revolution would try to understand the meaning of what they had wrought. There he would have to tell his old friend Albert Einstein that he had chosen to side with Niels Bohr. Ehrenfest, the 34-year-old Austrian professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University in Holland, was convinced that the atomic realm was as strange and ethereal as Bohr argued.

In a note to Einstein as they sat around the conference table, Ehrenfest scribbled: 'Don't laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.' 'Who knows who would have the [last] laugh in a few years?' For him it was no laughing matter, for at stake was the very nature of reality and the soul of physics.

The photograph of those gathered at the fifth Solvay conference on 'Electrons and Photons', held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October 1927, encapsulates the story of the most dramatic period in the history of physics. With seventeen of the 29 invited eventually earning a Nobel Prize, the conference was one of the most spectacular meetings of minds ever held. unparalleled since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century led by Galileo and Newton.

Paul Ehrenfest is standing, slightly hunched forward, in the back row, third from the left. There are nine seated in the front row. Eight men and one woman; six have Nobel Prizes in either physics or chemistry. The woman has two, one for physics awarded in 1903 and another for chemistry in 1911. Her name: Marie Curie. In the centre, the place of honour, sits another Nobel laureate, the most celebrated scientist since the age of Newton: Albert Einstein. Looking straight ahead, gripping the chair with his right hand, he seems ill at ease. Is it the winged collar and tie that are causing him discomfort, or what he has heard during the preceding week? At the end of the second row, on the right, is Niels Bohr, looking relaxed with a half-whimsical smile. It had been a good conference for him. Nevertheless, Bohr would be returning to Denmark disappointed that he had failed to convince Einstein to adopt his 'Copenhagen interpretation' of what quantum mechanics revealed about the nature of reality.

Instead of yielding, Einstein had spent the week attempting to show that quantum mechanics was inconsistent, that Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation was flawed. Einstein said years later that 'this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts'.

It was Max Planck, sitting on Marie Curie's right, holding his hat and cigar, who discovered the quantum. In 1900 he was forced to accept that the energy of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation could only be emitted or absorbed by matter in bits, bundled up in various sizes. 'Quantum' was the name Planck gave to an individual packet of energy, with 'quanta' being the plural. The quantum of energy was a radical break with the long-established idea that energy was emitted or absorbed continuously, like water flowing from a tap. In the everyday world of the macroscopic where the physics of Newton ruled supreme, water could drip from a tap, but energy was not exchanged in droplets of varying size. However, the atomic and subatomic level of reality was the domain of the quantum.