eugene+cheng+=+9

When speaking on the topic of quantum mechanics, it seems impossible to explain anything without dropping the name Albert Einstein. To be honest, he doesn’t actually play a very large role in the development of quantum physics, but we tend to remember him and only him as the revolutionary thinker in this time of change. For the most part, we know Max Planck and how he started the movement into the quantum realm of science. We remember his constant (h) and accredit the beginnings of modern physics to him. However, he pales in comparison to the almighty Einstein. From “The Origins of the Quantum Theory”, Cathryn Carson makes it seem as if Planck and everywhere else before Einstein only paved the path for Einstein to come along and do some “real” work in the field. “None of his colleagues made much of this possibility, either, until Albert Einstein took it up five years later.” Perhaps it is because Einstein is able to capitalize on other people’s ideas that it makes him so great. While many scientists come to a halt and get tangled in the complexity of science, only Einstein can think clearly and revolutionarily to see it all the way through. Also Einstein seems to be “the man” at everything he works with. When it comes to blackbodies, he wins a Nobel Prize for his thoughts on the photoelectric effect. And with specific heat, he is able to build on the Planck relation now known as the Planck–Einstein equation. "At low temperatures, solids display peculiar behavior. Here Einstein suspected—again we meet Einstein—that the deviance might be explicable on quantum grounds. So he reformulated Planck’s problem to handle a lattice of independently vibrating atoms.”  Concerning the model of an atom, we all of course know the story of Bohr and Rutherford. Somehow, though, Einstein sneaks his way into this storyline as well. “The wheel made its final turn when Einstein connected the Bohr atom back to blackbody radiation. His famous papers on radiative transitions, so important for the laser, showed the link among Planck’s blackbody law, discrete energy levels, and quantized emission and absorption of radiation.” It appears no one can make any real sense until Einstein comes along and puts in his final two cents. Maybe Einstein is lucky and happens to take up the right ideas to study or maybe he is Einstein and he able to see the whole picture even at the quantum level. 