WHAT WOULD EINSTEIN SAY?
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Editor's Note: This feature was originally published in our January 1992 issue. We are posting it because of recent discussions of the connections between chaos and quantum mechanics.

In 1917 Albert Einstein wrote a paper that was completely ignored for 40 years. In it he raised a question that physicists have only, recently begun asking themselves: What would classical chaos, which lurks everywhere in our world, do to quantum mechanics, the theory describing the atomic and subatomic worlds? The effects of classical chaos, of course, have long been observed-Kepler knew about the motion of the moon around the earth and Newton complained bitterly about the phenomenon. At the end of the 19th century the American astronomer William Hill demonstrated that the irregularity is the result entirely of the gravitational pull of the sun. So thereafter, the great French mathematician-astronomer-physicist Henri Poincaré surmised that the moon's motion is only mild case of a congenital disease affecting nearly everything. In the long run Poincaré realized, most dynamic systems show no discernible regularity or repetitive pattern. The behavior of even a simple system can depend so sensitively on its initial conditions that the final outcome is uncertain.

At about the time of Poincaré's seminal work on classical chaos, Max Planck started another revolution, which would lead to the modern theory of quantum mechanics. The simple systems that Newton had studied were investigated again, but this time on the atomic scale. The quantum analogue of the humble pendulum is the laser; the flying cannonballs of the atomic world consist of beams of protons or electrons, and the rotating wheel is the spinning electron (the basis of magnetic tapes). Even the solar system itself is mirrored in each of the atoms found in the periodic table of the elements.

Perhaps the single most outstanding feature of the quantum world is its smooth and wavelike nature. This feature leads to the question of how chaos makes itself felt when moving from the classical world to the quantum world. How can the extremely irregular character of classical chaos be reconciled with the smooth and wavelike nature of phenomena on the atomic scale? Does chaos exist in the quantum world'? Preliminary work seems to show that it does. Chaos is found in the distribution of energy levels of certain atomic systems; it even appears to sneak into the wave patterns associated with those levels. Chaos is also found when electrons scatter from small molecules. I must emphasize, however, that the term "quantum chaos" serves more to describe a conundrum than to define a well-posed problem.

Considering the following interpretation of the bigger picture may be helpful in coming to grips with quantum chaos. All our theoretical discussions of mechanics can be somewhat artificially divided into three compartments [see illustration] although nature recognizes none of these divisions.

Elementary classical mechanics falls in the first compartment. This box contains all the nice, clean systems exhibiting simple and regular behavior, and so I shall call it R, for regular. .Also contained in R is an elaborate mathematical tool called perturbation theory which is used to calculate the effects of small interactions and extraneous disturbances, such as the influence of the sun on the moon's motion around the earth. With the help of perturbation theory, a large part of physics is understood nowadays as making relatively mild modifications of regular systems. Reality though, is much more complicated; chaotic systems lie outside the range of perturbation theory and they constitute the second compartment.