Another conspicuous failure of classical mechanics was with one aspect of the problem of radiation. ...Imagine a crowd of steel balls rolling about o… - James Hopwood Jeans

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Another conspicuous failure of classical mechanics was with one aspect of the problem of radiation. ...Imagine a crowd of steel balls rolling about on a steel floor. ...There must... be a steady leakage of energy from... causes, such as air resistance and the friction of the floor, so the balls will eventually lose energy, and, after no great length of time, will be found standing at rest on the floor. The energy of their motion seems to have been lost... most of it has been transformed into heat. The classical mechanics predicts that this must happen; it shows that all energy of motion, except possibly a minute fraction of the whole, must be transformed into heat whenever such a transformation is physically possible. It is because of this that perpetual-motion machines are a practical impossibility.

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About James Hopwood Jeans

Sir James Hopwood Jeans (11 September 1877 – 16 September 1946) was a British physicist, astronomer and mathematician.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: James Jeans Sir James Jeans Sir James Hopwood Jeans James H. Jeans James H Jeans J. H. Jeans J.H. Jeans J H Jeans
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...a detailed mathematical discussion shows that whatever kind of wave-packet we select to represent the electron, the product of the two uncertainties of position and momentum can never be less than h, which is precisely what Heisenberg found...

Heisenberg finds that facts of observation lead uniquely and inevitably to the theoretical structure known as matrix mechanics. This shows that the total radiation in any region of empty space can change only by a single complete quantum at a time. Thus not only in the photo-electric phenomenon, but in all other transfers of energy through space, energy is always transferred by complete quanta; fractions of a quantum can never occur. This brings atomicity into our picture of radiation just as definitely as the discovery of the electron and its standard charge brought atomicity into our picture of matter and of electricity.

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It would, however, be wrong to think of an electron as a bullet-like structure with tentacles sticking out from its surface. We can calculate the mass of the bullet, and also the mass of the tentacles. The two masses are found to be identical, each agreeing with the known mass of the electron. Thus we cannot take the electron to be bullet plus tentacles... The two pictures do not depict two different parts of the electron, but two different aspects of the electron. They are not additive but alternative; as one comes into play, the other must disappear.

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