Volume 8, Number 7 · April 20, 1967
On Niels Bohr
By Victor F. Weisskopf
Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science, and the World They Changed
by Ruth Moore
Knopf, 436 pp., $6.95
The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory
by Barbara Lovett Cline
Thomas Y. Crowell, 274 pp., $5.00
Thirty Years that Shook Physics
by George Gamow
Doubleday, 240 pp., $1.45 (paper)
One achievement that stands apart, in the complex history of ideas of the twentieth century, is the development of our concept of the structure of matter. It was a steady development, which penetrated deeper and deeper into the inner structure of the atom, ever broadening with each step our understanding of material things. Modern scientific progress is usually described as a series of revolutions and upheavals, in which old ideas are destroyed by a new theory. This description, however, overlooks the fundamental fact that scientific development is intrinsically evolutionary. Indeed, each of the new 'revolutionary' ideas in modern science was a refinement of the old system of thought, a generalization or an extension. Relativity did not replace Newton's mechanics—orbits of satellites are still calculated with Newton's theory—but extended its application to extreme velocities and established the general validity of a common conceptual basis for both systems of mechanics and electricity. Quantum theory came perhaps nearest to being revolutionary, but even its ideas, such as the uncertainty principle, must be considered as a refinement, an application of mechanics to very small systems; quantum theory did not change the validity of classical mechanics to the motion of bodies of larger size.
Review, 4888 words
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