Electrons and Photons. Repports et Discussion du Cinquieme Conseil de Physique tenu a Bruxelles...de l'Institu International de Physique Solvay

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1928. FIRST EDITION. Text illustrations. Recent cloth, new endpapers. First edition. The fifth Solvay conference was perhaps the most famous, as it included luminaries such as Nobelists Einstein, Bohr, Bragg, Compton, Bohr, Dirac, Schrodinger, Curie, De Broglie and Heisenberg. Papers here include Bragg's "L'intensité de réflexions des rayons X"; Compton's "Discordances entre l'experience et la theorie électro-magnétique du rayonnement"; De Broglie, "La nouvelle dynamique des quanta"; Born & Heisenberg, "La mécanique des quanta"; (truncated) Schrödinger, "La mécanique des ondes"; and Bohr, "Le postulat des quanta et le nouveau développement de l'atomistique".

This was also the beginning of the Bohr-Einstein debates, a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics. Bohr proposed that wave equations described where entities like electrons could be; however the entities didn't actually exist as particles until someone went looking for them. The act of observation caused existence. In Bohr's own words, the entities in question had no "independent reality in the ordinary physical sense." Einstein of course was a bit more empirical. An electron was an electron, and just because someone wasn't looking at it, it was still there - wherever "there" happened to be. (Inventory #: 15411)