ABSTRACT
In 1978, James Burke published a book called Connections (it has since been reissued), and he also did a series on PBS with the same title. The purpose was to identify a thread that connected a number of discoveries and advances in science and technology over a long period of time. In discussing a particular thread as it wove through time, he followed what seemed to him to be a path in the development of man. Each path was focused on a single theme, such as the importance of metallurgy. While most historians of science would probably have different views on such developments than Burke, his work does illustrate the fact that independent events in science sometimes are coupled over the years by such developments. It is certainly clear that Max Planck’s work on blackbody radiation at the end of the nineteenth century led him to postulate that light was actually composed of small particle-like entities. That is, light was quantized into units of energy. This idea then led Einstein, in 1905, to develop an explanation of photoemission solely in terms of particle properties and the classical ideas of conservation of energy and momentum. The conundrum of the early twentieth
century also fed other events. Niels Bohr developed his model of the atom based upon each electron having a well-established orbit around the nucleus with the proviso that such orbits would not exhibit the normally expected decay of amplitude. The rest of the theory was basically classical physics. The Bohr theory led Louis de Broglie to suggest that the stability of such orbits lay in the fact that the electrons actually were waves. Hence, each orbit existed with a size demand that allowed only a fixed number of wavelengths in the circumference. This interplay between waves and particles ultimately led to the development of modern quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and Schrödinger, to name just the two most popular. There were certainly many others who had a hand in the development of the field.
