Abstract
WE referred last week, p. 138, to the meeting of the Royal Society on Jan. 17, at which Prof. Eddington described some speculations on a new development of quantum mechanics, published in the January issue of the Proceedings of the Society. So much prominence has been given to the paper in the public press that some further remarks upon it in these columns may be worth while. The speculations put forward are of a very interesting type, for they attempt to assimilate what we now call interchange of electrons to a transformation in a new co-ordinate or co-ordinates, similar to a Lorentz transformation in space-time co-ordinates in that it can never be observed. The starting point of these speculations is the observation that we now describe the interaction of electrons by two principles, Coulomb's electrostatic forces and Pauli's exclusion principle, and that every principle of scientific assthetics requires us somehow to weld them into one. This observation is perhaps the most promising and interesting part of the paper. The main part of the paper is concerned with speculations as to how perhaps this might be done, and the description of the interchange of electrons already alluded to is Prof. Eddington's attempt at a weld.
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[News and Views]. Nature 123, 174–179 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/123174a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/123174a0