well, obviously. This was always pretty clear to anyone who put some serious thought into it. Did anyone really think electrons just magically jump from state to state? There is a real physical process there that takes time.
>well, obviously. This was always pretty clear to anyone who put some serious thought into it. Did anyone really think electrons just magically jump from state to state?
Only prominent QM scientists. Amateur pundits always knew that they don't magically jump.
There is a famous story about a guy trying to convince Niels Bohr in 60's that quantum transitions in different molecules close to each other can coherently influence each other and result in amplified emission of coherent radiation. Bohr utters something in the sense that is impossible, quantum transitions are random, photons are not correlated, so the molecules can never cooperate. The guy didn't take the prominent QM scientist too seriously, went on and built the device. He was the famous Charles Townes, one of discoverers of the maser/laser effect. Of course, he knew the transitions aren't instantaneous but take time and mutual interaction of molecules and mirrors can synchronize them.
So is the moral of the story that everybody (or close) that doubts some consensus in physics is a misunderstood genius?
There's also 1000 times more stories of crackpots "knowing" everything, from how to do cold fusion, to perpetual machines, to why Relativity or QM is wrong, etc. They even have the diagrams and math to show you they're right.
And yes, some of them even "knew" things verified later - if you have random unsupported opinions some of those will also be legit.
Unless the parent had some actual proof for their insight before the verification, the phrase "This was always pretty clear to anyone who put some serious thought into it" (as if physicists who didn't regard this didn't) is as good as someone saying the same about a coin toss ("hey, it turned out to be heads, anyone could see that").
No, the story is interesting because it shows the authorities on the subject do get things wrong, and because Townes and many other important scientists knew that the simple idea of instantaneous quantum jumps due to Bohr and Heisenberg and maybe Pauli (I think these three were one the most prominent proponents) wasn't that well secured by the general quantum theory and by the experiments.
The moral is that Bohr just was a guy who lucked into being in the right time and place to contribute to quantum mechanics but that does not make him an otherwise exceptionally insightful into it. Actually, this also is kind of the case with Maxwell. He managed to put together the all-important theory about electromagnetic waves while having in his mind some weird mechanical image of the vacuum that makes one wonder what this guy was actually thinking. And I have to add to this that I consider Maxwell to be a much greater physicist than Bohr. It could well be that being the discoverer of something leads to some kind of intellectual myopia and that further generations are needed to look more sensibly at what was actually discovered.
Yes, that is a very good point. The 'quantum leap' thing comes from the origin of quantum mechanics when things were not well understood and a struggle for understanding was going on and crude concepts were introduced. The more correct theory for atomic decays has been known to be quantum electrodynamics for a long time now. Since an atom is a thing that extends over some space the Feynman diagrams that contribute to it have multiple vertices and the whole thing clearly should be extended over space and time. It is nice to have experimental confirmation of this but it really is quite the opposite of unexpected.
I have made some simulations of quantum 'jumps'. Although the veracity of the simulation could be debated, it's pretty clear what's happening when you see it in action.
Some day i'll write it up in a blog post and put the videos on youtube.
I mean, the paper just describes an experiment that confirmed the theory that's from the 90s. So it's definitely not a surprise, since this behaviour was expected...
