100 Years Before Quantum Mechanics, a Physicist Spotted Its Hidden Clue

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 100 Years Before Quantum Mechanics, a Physicist Spotted Its Hidden Clue




Hamilton’s 19th-century insight connecting light and motion became a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and modern physics.

William Rowan Hamilton, the Irish mathematician and physicist born 220 years ago last month, is often remembered for an unusual act in 1843, when he carved a mathematical formula into the stone of Dublin’s Broome Bridge.During his own lifetime, however, Hamilton’s standing rested on breakthroughs he made much earlier, in the 1820s and early 1830s, while he was still in his twenties. In that period, he introduced powerful new mathematical methods for analyzing the paths of light rays (or “geometric optics”) and describing how physical objects move (“mechanics”).

An intriguing feature of Hamilton’s work was his use of an analogy between the trajectory of a light ray and the motion of a material particle. That comparison made sense if light were composed of particles, as Isaac Newton had argued. But it raised a deeper question if light behaved instead like a wave: why should the mathematics of waves and particles resemble one another at all?

The significance of this question would only become clear a hundred years later. As quantum mechanics emerged in the early twentieth century, physicists recognized that Hamilton’s framework was not merely a clever analogy, but an early window into the fundamental structure of the physical world.

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