100 years ago, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach demonstrated that silver atoms have a quantized magnetic moment, as predicted from the Bohr–Sommerfeld model of the atom. But the correct interpretation of the result proved to be far more subtle — and revolutionary.
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References
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Acknowledgements
The author benefited from conversations with R. Folman, B. Friedrich, D. Herschbach, K. Jousten, D. Kaiser, Y. Margalit, M. Peskin, D. Rowe and H. Schmidt-Böcking.
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Castelvecchi, D. The Stern–Gerlach experiment at 100. Nat Rev Phys 4, 140–142 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-022-00436-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-022-00436-4
