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Re: Quantum Leap

Tim Folkerts makes a good addition to my thoughts. I was imagining
that "sufficient" infinitesimal steps could eventually lead to the same
place as the quantum leap. Tim eloquently explained that there are
some cases in which the infinitesimal steps will never lead to the
place where the quantum leap went. I think that's a valuable insight.

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817



-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Folkerts [SMTP:tfolkert@TIGER.FHSU.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 10:54 AM
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: Re: Quantum Leap

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