Monday, September 9, 2019

Quantum theory

H.L. Mencken was a very talented product of his time and background. I agree with many of his beliefs and disagree with many. One area where we agree is evidenced by something he wrote about quantum theory in 1931, when I was aged 7 years:

If chemists were similarly given to fanciful and mystical guessing, they would have hatched a quantum theory forty years ago to account for the variations that they observed in atomic weights. But they kept on plugging away in their laboratories without calling in either mathematicians or theologians to aid them, and eventually they discovered the isotopes, and what had been chaos was reduced to the most exact sort of order.

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