Page 28 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

moved like a wave through space, but be-
haved as an active particle when it encoun-
tered an obstacle. To express it another way,
it adopted the form of energy until encoun-
tering an obstacle, at which time it assumed
the form of particles, as if it were composed
of tiny material bodies reminiscent of grains
of sand.
After Planck, this theory was further ex- Max Planck
panded by scientists such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de
Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Adrian Ma-
urice Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli. Each was awarded the Nobel Prize
for his discoveries.
About this new discovery regarding the nature of light, Amit
Goswami says this:

When light is seen as a wave, it seems capable of being in two (or
more) places at the same time, as when it passes through the slits of
an umbrella and produces a diffraction pattern; when we catch it on
a photographic film, however, it shows up discretely, spot by spot,
like a beam of particles. So light must be both a wave and a particle.
Paradoxical, isn’t it? At stake is one of the bulwarks of the old
physics: unambiguous description in language. Also at stake is the
idea of objectivity: Does the nature of light—what light is—depend
on how we observe it? 9
Scientists now no longer believed that matter consists of inan-
imate, random particles. Quantum physics had no materialist sig-
nificance, because there were non-material things at the essence of
matter. While Einstein, Philipp Lenard and Arthur Holly Compton
investigated the particle structure of light, Louis de Broglie be-
gan looking at its wave structure.
De Broglie’s discovery was an extraordinary one: In his re-
search, he observed that sub-atomic particles also displayed

26