Physics 08 - A Quantum Egg Poem by Unnikrishnan Sivasankara Menon

The year was 1925. Werner Heisenberg was just 23. A student of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and now, of Max Born in Gottingen.

Ernst Mach, often called the Buddha of Science, was an Austrian physicist of the 19th century. Heisenberg embraced Mach's dictum that theories should avoid any concepts that cannot be observed, measured or verified. He avoided the concept of electron orbits, which cannot be observed.

Instead, he resorted to mathematical approach to analyse the wavelengths of the lines in the spectrums of the radiation from the electrons. The matrices so derived interested his mentor Max Born, who got the paper published. Heisenberg, with Born and his colleagues, went on to perfect the method, which came to be known as Matrix Mechanics, akin to Schrodinger's Wave Mechanics.

Einstein was not convinced. He wrote making a dig at his close friend Born, "Heisenberg has laid a big quantum egg. In Gottingen, they believe in it. I don't."

P.S.: We will dedicate one full chapter to Wave Mechanics. But, we need to address the Uncertainty Principle before that.