Diagrams, Visualizations, Intuition and Critical Thinking QED

"The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become a embarrassingly false image. ... Bohr himself had set the tone. In accepting the Nobel Prize for his atomic model, he said it was time to give up the hope of explanation in terms of analogies with everyday experience. 'We are therefore obliged to be modest in our demands and content ourselves with concepts that are formal in the sense that they do not provide a visual picture of the sort one is accustomed to require. . . .' This progress had not been altogether free of tension. 'The more I reflect on the physical portion of Schrödinger's theory, the more disgusting I find it,' was Heisenberg's 1926 comment to Pauli. 'Just imagine the rotating electron who charge is distributed over the entire space with axes in 4 or 5 dimensions. What Schrödinger writes on the visualizability of his theory . . . I consider trash.' As much as physicists valued the conceptualizing skill they called intuition, as much as they spoke of a difference between physical understanding and formal understanding, they had nevertheless learned to mistrust any picture of subatomic reality that resembled everyday experience. No more baseballs, artillery shells, or planetoids for the quantum theorists; no more idle wheels or wavy lines. Feynman's father had asked him, in the story he told many times: 'I understand that when an atom makes a transition from one state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon. . . . Is the photon in the atom ahead of time? . . . Well, where does it come from, then? How does it come out?' No one had a mental image for this, the radiation of light, the interaction of matter with the electromagnetic field: the defining event of quantum electrodynamics." p.242.

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reflection critical thinking intuition	physics Bohr's atomic model reflection

Gleick, J., (1992) GENIUS - Richard Feynman and modern physics, London: Little Brown and Company, p.242.