Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Principle of Duality
Part 1
The Concept
“Light itself is quantized”, said Einstein and nobody believed him. We all have studied chemistry as a subject where facts were presented to us in form of theories in chronological order as they occurred. We all started with Dalton’s atomic theory moved to J.J Thomson’s Plum Pudding model. Rutherford’s scattering experiment and his attempts to fix the structure of an atom. His failure to explain the stability of atom lead to Neil Bohr’s structure of atom which was later refined to produce the quantum mechanical model. We all have studied the same in our higher secondary school texts. Things which we have never read or even tried to understand are that how exactly it happened. Most of us will never know that all these Physicists were contemporaries. J.J Thomson and Rutherford taught in the same college. Neil Bohr was himself a student of Rutherford and later became his colleague at Cambridge. Major portion of our academics concentrate on theories and what they implies, as a student we never learn how it would have actually been derived.
Energy is radiated and absorbed in the form of packets; these packets of energy are known as quanta. Max Planck derived this theory to justify Black Body radiations though he himself never believed in the concept of quantum, it was just a hypothesis to prove an equation correct. Neil Bohr borrowed the concept of quantum to fix the flaws of his atomic structure and to find out the energy states but like Planck he also had little faith on the concept of quantum. For all the leading personalities in Applied Physics quantum was just an aid to fix their equations. The age old wave theory dominated as it was able to justify more phenomenons as compared to Newton’s corpuscular theory. During this period itself a man stood alone with his theories simple yet difficult to digest, effective but hard to accept, practically justified but theoretically challenging the established framework of modern Physics. Albert Einstein received his first Noble for Photoelectric effect, he justified this phenomenon by considering light to be quantized, that it is received in form of packets (if you remember from your textbooks photoelectric effect is taught just after Planck’s Quantum Theory, but we will never know that Planck never accepted Einstein’s quantization of light theory). When application was sent to Scandinavian committees for consideration, people accepted the photo electric effect but were too apprehensive to neglect the wave theory.
Wave nature or Particle behavior both explained certain natural process, but still there were experiments that time to time favored either one of them. During the mean time elite physicists like Heisenberg tried to make situation even more difficult. Principle of uncertainty in a way helped to combat the existing war between the wave and the particle. Louis De Broglie came up with an exciting theory, the Principle of Duality. Every matter and energy exhibits wave as well as particle behavior, the extent of its particle or wave behavior depends on the mass in case of matter. The paradigm shifted in favor of Einstein. His theory of relativity too stated that matter can transform into energy if it attains velocity of light, the mass of a body is not constant it is relative to velocity.
This was a brief account of our history which is never taught to us as a story. Just imagine how it would have been for all these people to argue in favor of their theories, for the likes of Planck and Bohr, who used the concept to prove the validity of their concept but never really believed on that.
Principle of Duality actually suggested that natural phenomenon can be explained for an elementary particle like electron and also for a human being. We can devise the structure of the atom and can use the same theories to explain the structure of a society. After all atoms are basic building blocks of all matter, all the actions sums up.
This ends the first installment of Principle of Duality. We are yet to discuss the ‘Society’.

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