Oppenheimer didn't know anyone named Dirac. He only saw a tall, thin British man. As soon as he entered the door, he rushed in front of his teacher.
This is great!
He quickly put down the paper and pen in his hand, rushed directly to Chen Muwu, and stood in front of him.
Although Oppenheimer was the shortest of the three, he still stood there firmly.
Having stayed in Cambridge for nearly a month, he became increasingly tired of the rigid and closed environment in the UK.
Although Chen Muwu was kind to him, he was always filled with anger.
Just when he was about to sleep, someone handed him a pillow. Oppenheimer had already made a plan in his mind. If this blind British guy wanted to take action, he would directly uppercut him in the stomach.
After Chen Muwu thought for a moment, he understood what the situation in front of him was about.
It seems that this American must have recognized himself from the bottom of his heart, so he should not be in danger of being poisoned in his life.
"Robert, don't be too nervous. This is my good friend, a theoretical genius - Paul Dirac. He is not a bad person, so don't worry!"
Oppenheimer was very embarrassed. He didn't expect that for the first time, he would meet the teacher's friend.
Chen Muwu then introduced his student to Dirac: "Paul, this is Robert Oppenheimer, a top student at Harvard University in the United States. He just entered the Cavendish Laboratory this summer and is now doing some research with me. "
"Mr. Dirac, I'm so sorry, I thought, uh, you wanted to do something to Teacher Chen."
"It doesn't matter."
"By the way, Robert, can you sort out everything I said today as soon as possible and give it to me?"
"Of course, no problem, Teacher Chen!"
After giving Oppenheimer a task and sending him away, Chen Muwu took Dirac's sleeve and walked out the door.
"If anything happens, let's go outside and talk about it."
The reason why he was so anxious to leave was that he was afraid that after the group of people who came to listen to the lecture today thought deeply about the problem of probability waves, they would surround him and ask all kinds of questions.
Chen Muwu took Dirac directly to his room at Trinity College. After making him a cup of tea, he asked: "Paul, what mistake did you find on my part that made you so anxious?"
"It's about Chen's statistics and Chen's exclusion principle. There is a contradiction between the two papers you published one after another."
Oh, it turns out to be this.
Unlike most physicists in the world, the matrices used by Chen Muwu in quantum mechanics were not a problem for Dirac, who majored in mathematics.
This is just a mathematical tool. It is no different from the four arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is just slightly more advanced than the latter.
However, another problem about atoms troubled Dirac all summer.
Before the discovery of neutrons, the only way physicists and chemists could distinguish elements was by looking at the number of electrons outside their nuclei.
So Dirac has never been able to figure out why neon Ne and sodium Na only differ by one in the number of electrons, but they show very different chemical properties. One is a gas and the other is a metal.
Until he saw the wave equation proposed by Chen Muwu in his latest paper published in the journal Nature.
Dirac thought about using Chen Muwu's wave equation to try to figure out what would happen if there were two electrons in an atom.
And he also wanted to know, if the two electrons were to exchange positions, whether the two results would be the same or different.
The results of the solution show that exchanging positions will only change the sign of the front of the wave, and will not produce other differences.
This reminded Dirac of the idea put forward by his good friend Chen Muwu when he was establishing matrix mechanics, that is, experiments cannot observe the difference between two electrons after they exchange positions.
Because people cannot specifically observe electrons, they can only judge by the light emitted from atoms.
Obviously, whether the positions of electrons are exchanged or not has no effect at all on the light emitted from the atoms.
He realized that this was probably the exclusion principle regarding electron orbits in the atomic model that Chen Muwu had proposed before.
But before Dirac was happy for long, he suddenly realized the contradiction between the Chen Exclusion Principle and another theory he had proposed before.
Around this time last year, Chen Muwu proposed a new statistical method that was different from the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics in macrophysics. He used this quantum statistical method called Chen statistics to successfully study from first properties The principle derived Planck's law of thermal radiation.
However, in Chen Muwu's calculations at that time, the particles used were photons, and the spin of photons was 1, which was an integer.
Therefore, a large number of photons can be infinitely superimposed on the same quantum state.
However, after this, Chen Muwu proposed the "Chen Exclusion Principle" named after his surname at the beginning of this year. Particles with a spin of half, such as electrons, are not allowed to occupy the same quantum state. , even if they have exactly the same quantum numbers.
Therefore, for microscopic particles such as electrons, quantum statistical methods such as Chen statistics cannot be used. If it is applied forcefully, it is likely to lead to the extremely absurd conclusion that the entropy of the system becomes negative infinity.
So there is an urgent need to find a new form of quantum statistics that can be applied to electrons.
Dirac hurriedly took the train from his hometown in Bristol to Cambridge just to talk to Chen Muwu about this matter.
Although a butterfly named Chen Muwu was constantly flapping its wings, the wheel of history was still rolling forward, and Dirac still found this thing that originally belonged to him.
Historically, shortly after Schrödinger proposed his equation, Dirac submitted a theoretical report to the Royal Society, which stated that he had developed a new quantum statistical method for electrons.
But less than a month after the publication of his article, a letter from the University of Rome was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge University.
Professor Fermi of the University of Rome pointed out in the letter, "In your interesting paper titled "On the Theory of Quantum Mechanics," you proposed a theory about ideal gases based on the Pauli exclusion principle. .Now, an ideal gas theory that is almost identical to yours has been published by me at the beginning of this year. I am assuming that you have not read this article of mine, so I now remind you to pay attention to it."
Fermi's letter seemed very polite on the surface, but in fact there was a lot of truth in it.
The meaning between the lines of this letter is that I want an explanation. Is the statistical law Dirac derived in this paper derived independently, or was he inspired by Fermi's paper? In other words, he plagiarized it. Come.
In later generations, the physics community has never reached a conclusion on this academic plagiarism case.
Because Fermi's wife was Jewish, and because of Mussolini's anti-Semitic policies, she ran away from Italy to the United States.
Therefore, a group of Jewish scientists in the United States, especially represented by Thomas Kuhn, firmly believed that Dirac, an Englishman, had plagiarized Jewish wisdom.
They not only believed that Dirac plagiarized Fermi in quantum statistics, but also believed that Dirac also plagiarized the results of the Jew Born in the study of quantum mechanics.
And the reason why a young man who has not even received a doctoral degree can be so capable and "plagiarize" many great scientific results one after another without being criticized.
The reason given by these American Jews was that Dirac studied at the University of Cambridge, the top university in the UK, and was also the beloved disciple of Rutherford's son-in-law Fowler, and later had a close personal relationship with Bohr.
However, Pauli, who was also a Jew, stood up and firmly supported Dirac on this issue. He believed that Dirac had never read Fermi's article before writing the paper, and the idea of plagiarism was simply nonsense. .
"The past events of the Six Dynasties flow with the passing of time." Whether Dirac plagiarized or not plagiarized on this matter, it was all a matter of his previous life.
Anyway, in this life, if nothing else happens, he should be the first, uh, second person to propose this new statistical law.
At this time, Fermi was probably still studying the theory of relativity under Ehrenfest at Leiden University, and had not yet completely shifted his academic focus to the microscopic world.
Recently, Chen Muwu first participated in the Olympic Games, and then was busy writing these papers on wave equations. He had long forgotten the quantum statistical method originally called Fermi-Dirac statistics.
After being reminded by Dirac, he remembered that there was such a thing.
"Paul, you are right. I have thought about this issue before, but because I have been so busy recently, I put it aside and even forgot about it. Let me Think about it..."
Chen Muwu quickly searched the difference between Bose-Einstein statistics and Fermi-Dirac statistics in his brain.
Then he picked up the pen and paper on the desk and wrote two lines of formulas on it.
"There are indeed some differences in the statistical laws of the two particles, photons and electrons. I have calculated it once before, right here." Chen Muwu pointed to the only difference between the two lines of formulas on the paper except for the angles. "Here There’s a plus or minus difference.”
Chen Muwu showed such confidence that Dirac was both surprised and admired.
He took out a few pieces of draft paper from the document bag he carried with him. The formulas written on them were completely consistent with those given by Chen Muwu except for the use of letters.
"Chen! Did you derive the formula for the average number of particles at this energy level a long time ago, so you were so calm after hearing the question I raised?"
In front of the master, Chen Muwu nodded with some shame: "That's right, but I have been studying quantum mechanics recently and have not been able to devote my energy to statistical physics.
"See what this means, you also calculated the same result as me?"
Dirac nodded, his expression was happy at first, and then turned into deep helplessness: "I thought I found a mistake of yours, thinking that I could finally get in front of you this time, but I didn't expect it. It’s too late.”
"It's not too late, not too late! Although I derived this formula, I never wrote a paper, let alone published it. You just happened to get this result, so I invite you to write a paper and put this new quantum statistics into practice. Method, publish it in a journal!”
"But this is a theory you discovered first, how can it be my turn to publish it?"
"It doesn't matter. After all, you derived it independently. Just pretend that you don't know that I have done such work! I really don't have time to write this paper now."
Chen Muwu thought that Dirac only discovered this discord and did not calculate the answer himself, so he just wrote the formula on paper.
If he had known that Dirac had derived this new statistical law, Chen Muwu would have never wanted to take away this credit.
After all, he already has a quantum statistics called "Chen Statistics" in his name, and in the future there will also be a particle classification method called "Chen Zi".
If he now takes the second statistical method as his own, how should the two formulas be distinguished in the future?
Chen 1 statistics and Chen 2 statistics? Chen Yizi and Chen Erzi?
It sounds really awkward.
So now he is thinking about giving this credit to his friend no matter what.
In the future, when talking about Chern statistics and Dirac statistics in statistical physics, and Chernzions and Dirac statistics in particle physics, it can also be regarded as a good story.
Maybe by then, a sign will be hung next to the door of Mrs. Brown's house.
Engraved on the sign are the faces of Chen Muwu and Dirac, as well as the formulas of Chen Statistics and Dirac Statistics.
At the bottom, maybe there will be a few lines of small words engraved with explanations:
From 1923 to 1924, physicists Chen Muwu and Paul Dirac lived here.
During this period, the two men proposed quantum statistical laws for Chenzi and Dirac particles respectively.
But everyone seems to have forgotten that there was a man named Kapitsa who also lived in this house for a long time.
(End of chapter)
