100 Year Quantum Leaps
1704:
Isaac Newton publishes Opticks* / Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light
Isaac Newton, the last great Alchymist, proved experimentally that an unseen, occult world really does exist hidden inside the macro-world of earth, air, fire, and water. It is a micro-world of miniature bodies he called (in the science jargon* of his day) corpuscles.
Newton wrote with anticipation about a future when improved microscopes would allow people “to see the more secret and noble Works of Nature within the Corpuscles” where, he speculated, would be found even tinier corpuscles, like increasingly smaller nesting dolls. “In like manner these smaller Particles are again composed of other much smaller… and so on perpetual till you come to solid Particles, such as have no Pores or empty Spaces within them.”
If matter is corpuscular, what about light? Newton addressed the question of “Rays of Light, whether they be very small Bodies projected, or only Motion or Force propagated…” Does light travel as particles or as waves? Newton settled on the “very small Bodies” theory, which he illustrated with this analogy: “as Stones by falling upon Water put the Water into an undulating Motion,” so light corpuscles “by impinging on any … Surface, excite vibrations…” It was a prescient idea but, unfortunately, in the details very wrong. Newton’s prestige and influence allowed his very wrong theory to remain the consensus for 100 years.
1803:
Thomas Young delivers The Bakerian Lecture* — “Experiments and Calculations relative to physical Optics”
Thomas Young, the last great polymath, described the first double-slit experiment*. He projected light through two pin-prick apertures and mapped the resulting pattern. Interpreted through the lens of classical Newtonian physics, his revolutionary demonstration disproved the corpuscle theory of light and supported the wave theory.
Young’s illustration for his published lecture; the device would come to be known as Young’s double-slit interferometer
As Thomas stated so charmingly, “I think it will not be denied by the most prejudiced, that the assertion is proved by the experiments I am about to relate, which may be repeated with great ease, whenever the sun shines, and without any other apparatus than is at hand to everyone.”
Scientific consensus settled on matter and energy as two distinct phenomena. Particles made up matter. Waves carried light energy.
1905:
Albert Einstein publishes four papers in the journal Annals of Physics
“On a Heuristic Point of View* about the Creation and Conversion of Light”
“Investigations* on the Theory of the Brownian Movement”
“On the Electrodynamics* of Moving Bodies”
“Does the Inertia of a Body* Depend upon its Energy Content?”
A century later, Albert Einstein officiated at the marriage of particular matter and energy waves. The old Alchymists would have called it a Chymical Wedding, where Einstein blessed the coupling of two disparate entities. The two became one — a transmutation into one entirely new and original creature. Alchymists used poetic language when they wrote of marrying a Red King and a White Queen, two substances commingling into one flesh,* their intercourse merging them into one hermaphrodite. It was symbolic language to describe chemical change, the only language available to proto-chemists in a pre-scientific age.
Einstein was present at the beginning of a transmutation in how we perceive the cosmos. He married matter and energy so they became two faces of one hermaphroditic reality. His four papers published during 1905 helped establish an ironic truth — that Newton’s occult micro-world takes exception to Newton’s own laws of classical mechanics, laws that work so reliably in the macro-world.
Science historians call 1905 Einstein’s Annus mirabilis, his “Year of Wonders.” The poet John Dryden first used the Latin phrase annus mirabilis in English literature, choosing it as the title of his poem* to commemorate London’s momentous year 1666. Bubonic plague had already devastated the city’s people when a great fire destroyed most of the structures. Medieval London burned to the ground. Instead of writing a lament for what was lost, Dryden used Alchymical imagery to suggest that a “Chymick flame” had purged London of what was base and wrong and unholy. The city would be reborn in a “more precious mold … With silver pav’d, and all divine with gold.” Indeed, London did rebuild to become one of the great modern cities of Europe.
Similarly, physicists of the early 20th century burned away base notions of the material world and rebuilt a quantized universe.