Free Republic

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ model). What came next, said Rutherford, was ‘the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life’. Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as...

...Bohm showed that Einstein was partly right in that Bohr's view was incomplete. One must keep both the particles and force fields of the old physics in addition to the new quantum wave function. Contrary to Bohr, we can picture the motion of particles in space at the quantum level , but there is a new kind of quantum force in addition to the classical forces of electromagnetism, gravity and even the strong and weak forces of modern high energy physics. This new quantum force or "connection" is like The Force in George Lucas's Star Wars. Unlike ordinary forces the...

December 27, 2005 Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory By DENNIS OVERBYE Einstein said there would be days like this.This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in...

The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It by Jean F. Drew The Ancient Heritage of Western Science The history of science goes back at least two and a half millennia, to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece. Democritus and Leucippus were the fathers of atomic theory — at least they were the first thinkers ever to formulate one. Heraclitus was the first thinker to consider what in the modern age developed as the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise Plato’s Chora, in the myth of the Demiurge (see Timaeus), may have been the very first anticipation of...