SEMINAR 2025

A centennial reappraisal of Heisenberg’s Quantum Mechanics with a perspective on Einstein’s Quantum Riddles

SpeakerProf Tuck-Chuen Choy, Center for Space, Time and the Quantum, Cassis, Bouches du Rhône, 1320, France and
Departmento de Fisica-CIOyN, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia 30071, Spain.
Date/TimeWednesday, 12 Nov, 3pm
LocationS11-02-07 Conference Room 
HostProf Gong Jiangbin

Abstract

Heisenberg’s breakthrough in his July 1925 paper that set in motion the development of Quantum Mechanics through subsequent papers by Born, Jordan, Heisenberg and also Dirac (from 1925 to 1972) is reexamined through a modern lens. In this talk, I shall discuss some new perspectives on (i) what could be the guiding intuitions for his discoveries and (ii) the principles underlying the Born-Jordan-Heisenberg-Dirac canonical quantisation rule. From this vantage point we may get an insight into Einstein’s Quantum Riddle [1, 2, 3] and a possible glimpse of what might come next after the last 100 years of Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics. Some recent update of [4] and also [5], which includes Einstein’s second quantum riddle that is on the nature of the photon; and some new perspectives on gravity and quantum mechanics, will be presented.

References

  1. Alfred Land´e “Albert Einstein and the Quantum Riddle” Am. J. Phys. 42 459-464 (1974).
  2. See reference 1 in Lande [1].
  3. Max Born, in letter no 52, in the ”Born-Einstein Letters” MacMillan, (London) 1971.
  4. Tuck Choy, ‘A centennial reappraisal of Heisenberg’s Quantum Mechanics with a perspective on Einstein’s Quantum Riddle.’ https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04199., talk delivered on 04 July 2025 by the author at the Heisenberg centenary workshop, IQSA 2025 Conference, Tropea, Italy, to be published in a special celebratory volume for the Heisenberg centenary, by World Scientific Singapore in 2026.
  5. Tuck Choy, Miguel Ortu˜no, Basil Mahon and Nancy Forbes (deceased), ‘From Faraday and Maxwell to Quantum Physics. The later story of the Electromagnetic Vector Potential.’ talk delivered on 03 July 2025 by Miguel Ortu˜no at the Heisenberg centenary workshop, IQSA 2025 Conference, Tropea, Italy, to be published in a special celebratory volume for the Heisenberg centenary, by World Scientific Singapore in 2026.

Biography

Born in Singapore’s Chinatown in 1954, Professor Tuck Choy is the son of second-generation immigrants from China. His paternal grandparents emigrated from Guangzhou in 1921 ten years after Sun Yat-Sen founded the modern Republic of China. His maternal grandparents were also immigrants from the Fujian province in China. As a child he had his early education at the Pearl’s Hill English school for boys near Chinatown and then later at Rayman school at Balestier Road. His high school was at Gan Eng Seng school for boys in Anson Road. At a very young age about 14, he developed his main interest in Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Shakespeare, as well as world history including especially Chinese history, through the influence of his grandfather.

His family was poor, so he was at first unable to go to university. He worked as a laboratory technician for 3 years and managed to pursue his studies via the London University External degree program, for a Bachelor of Science in Physics. He managed to save up to go to London in 1977 to finish his final year BSc degree at Queen Mary College and was one of perhaps only two post-war External degree students awarded a BSc degree from London University with a First-Class Honors in Physics. London University then awarded him a postgraduate scholarship and in 1981 he graduated with a PhD in theoretical physics.

Thereafter he has traveled all over the world, first as postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London (1982-1986), visiting assistant Professor in Rhode (1984-1986) USA, research fellow in Canberra, Australia (1986-1988), then as Harwell Research Fellow at Wolfson College in Oxford (1988-1990). He returned to Australia as lecturer at Monash University in 1990, later promoted to Senior lecturer in 1992. In 1993 he returned to the UK and Singapore on a sabbatical and in 1997 to Santa Barbara USA also on a sabbatical. From 1998 to 2000 he was Visiting Professor at the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Hsinchu, Taiwan. During the early part of the millennial, he returned to the UK and in Manchester he joined Philip Semiconductors working in the industry and subsequently joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University College London in 2003. He has over 80 publications including two books by the time he retired in 2009. The second edition of his book: Effective Medium Theory , Principles and Applications published by Oxford University Press in 2015 has received over 1400 citations and his papers registered 9000 reads on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tuck-Choy?ev=hdr_xprf

His research interest is in the areas of Condensed Matter Physics, in particular, Superconductivity, Electronic Properties of Semiconductors and Metals, Statistical Mechanics, Many-Body Theory, Electrodynamics, Continuum Mechanics, Polymers, Computational Methods in Materials Modelling, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, Exactly Soluble Models, Spin Glasses, Density Functional Theory etc. In 1999 he was elected to be a Senior member of the IEEE, USA and is currently the editor of a special volume to celebrate the centenary of Heisenberg’s Quantum Mechanics, being the proceedings of the Heisenberg Centenary session of the IQSA Tropea 2025 conference in Italy in July 2025.

During his spare time. Professor Choy has his main interest in classical music, astronomy, Italian and Cantonese Opera and Shakespeare. He is an avid amateur radio operator currently holding a call sign F4WCV in France and has also published in amateur radio journals.