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So why did it stall? Apparently death by committee at the Solvay Conference with the insistence on an indeterministic paradigm. I've been having a field day le

• bsder 8y ago
  > So why did it stall? Apparently death by committee at the Solvay Conference with the insistence on an indeterministic paradigm. Not completely. Some of the issue is actually the technology available at the time. Einstein (who propounded a fields explanation for things) vs Bohr is the great debate and Bohr won. The problem, at the time, is that Einstein's formulations predicted certain things. For example, if Einstein's fields formulation is correct, you don't have electron levels that decay. And that's clearly incorrect. Except ... It turns out that the better and better you isolate an atom, the longer and longer it takes for its electrons to return to ground state. So, Einstein was correct, but it's only been in the very recent decades that we can create isolated, single quantum state systems which we can probe. Physics is often constrained by the technology of the time. How long did it take until Einstein's predictions were finally tested and confirmed? Look at how much engineering it has taken to bring the Kibble balance up to enough accuracy to become the new kilogram standard.