100 Years Ago, a Quantum Experiment Explained Why We Don’t Fall through Our Chairs
The moment I meet Horst Schmidt-Böcking outside the Bockenheimer Warte subway stop just north of the downtown area of Frankfurt, Germany, I know I have come to the right place. After my “Hi, thank you for meeting me,” his very first words are “I love Otto Stern.”
Schmidt-Böcking—a semi-retired experimentalist at Goethe University Frankfurt and arguably the world’s foremost expert on Stern’s life and work—is the best guide I could have hoped for. We walk around the block from the station, past the Senckenberg Natural History Museum Frankfurt, to the Physikalischer Verein, the local physicists’ society, which predates Goethe University Frankfurt’s 1914 founding.
Unlike classical magnets, the atoms were all deflected by the same amount, either upward or downward, thus splitting the beam into two discrete beams rather than spreading it across a vertical line. “When they did the experiment, they must have been shocked,” says Michael Peskin, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. Like many physicists, Peskin practiced doing the Stern-Gerlach experiment with modern equipment in an undergraduate lab class.
To test Bohr’s theory, Stern had set about exploring one of its most bizarre predictions, which Bohr himself did not quite believe: that in a magnetic field, atomic orbits can only lie at particular angles. To pursue this experiment, Stern realized that he could look for a magnetic effect of the electron’s orbit.
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