Re: Quantum Leap

[Timothy Folkerts <tfolkert@TIGER.FHSU.EDU>]

I like Michael Edmiston's thought:

> However, when someone has an "aha" experience, or someone on the design
> team has a "flash of inspiration," or manages to get the team to look
> at something in a new way, our understanding/design might leap forward.
> In doing so it can "leap" past many infinitesimal steps that the team
> might have gone through to get to the same point (much later in time)
> had the "aha" experience not taken place.
> That, is a quantum leap.

But I would go a step beyond this.  A team designing truss bridges can
refine the design until they have a (nearly) perfect truss bridge.  But
they will never get to a suspension bridge by making infinitesimal changes.

Similarly, you will never get to quantum physics by making infinitesimal
changes in classical theory.  Physicists were mostly making infinitesimal
refinements.  That's the main reason physics was thought to be basically
complete at the end of the last century.  (I just realized! In a couple
more months, we'll have to start saying "at the beginning of the last
century"!)

So I would say a quantum leap is paradigm shift - a leap from the familiar,
intuitive, well developed, "quantumless" world of classical physics to the
unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, bizarre "quantum" world of modern physics.


Tim Folkerts