A lost Schrödinger manuscript reveals a twist in quantum physics

1 day ago (sciencealert.com)

Schrödinger's fix to Whittaker's photon argument was to let the hidden variable take any value between zero and one, instead of just two. It's funny that such a small change was enough to rebuild the quantum probabilities.

Great article on an interesting topic.

The article mentions the great Physicist, Prof. S.N.Bose's take in a lecture delivered to the Indian Science Congress in 1944. It is titled "The Classical Determinism and The Quantum Theory".

The corresponding pdf can be found at Prof.S.N.Bose archive under Section 6 "Documents" titled "Presidential address at the Indian Science Congress, Delhi,1944 [Current Science, Vol XIII, No. 1]" - https://www.bose.res.in/Prof.S.N.Bose-Archive/

Prof. S.N.Bose is the Physics great after whom "Bosons", "Bose-Einstein Statistics", "Bose-Einstein Condensate" and even "Higgs Boson" are named - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose

  • I find SN Bose's derivation of quantized distribution of energy levels so much more elegant than Plank's which reads more like a desperate hack to force a predetermined answer.

    • Wikipedia has a telling quote from the Physicist, Prof. Partha Ghose;

      Bose's work stood at the transition between the 'old quantum theory' of Planck, Bohr and Einstein and the new quantum mechanics of Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Born, Dirac and others.

      I have always felt that Prof.S.N.Bose never got full credit and acclaim for his achievements maybe because there were so many other greats at that time though Einstein recognized his originality.