Table of Contents

Author's Note
Introduction

I. The Atom - A Historical Background
(i) Prelude in Greece
(ii) Elements and Principles
(iii) The Way of Truth
(iv) Atoms
(v) Roadblock
(vi) Atoms back in Vogue
(vii) Making Waves
(viii) Rudolf Steiner meets the Atom
(ix) Rejection
(x) The Age of Electricity
(xi) The Electrical Atom and Human Thought

II. A Background for Quanta
(i) Origins
(ii) Thermal Radiation
(iii) Enter Max Planck

III. Steiner in the Quantum Age
(i) Physical Science and Spiritual Science
(ii) The Goethean Alternative
(iii) The Primal Phenomenon

IV. Bohr's Atom -- Antecedents
(i) Periodic Tables
(ii) From Siberia with Love
(iii) Predictions and Confusions
(iv) The Hydrogen Spectrum
(v) Cathode Rays
(vi) The Unstable Atom

V. The Rutherford-Bohr Atom
(i) Bohr Gets Involved
(ii) The Hydrogen Atom
(iii) Beyond Hydrogen

VI. Late Words from Rudolf Steiner
(i) A Science of Dead Matter
(ii) The Demonic Atom
(iii) Don't be an Ostrich
(iv) The Struggle for Human Consciousness
(v) So what about the Electron?

VII. The Atom After Steiner
(i) Waves and Particles
(ii) Knabenphysik
(iii) "Thou Shalt Make No Mental Image."
(iv) Discontinuities and Probabilities
(v) HBJ or the Three-Man-Paper
(vi) Schrodinger's Wave Mechanics
(vii) Indeterminacy
(viii) Quantum Physics and the Periodic Table
(ix) More about Probability
(x) Niels Bohr -- A Goethean Physicist?
(xi) Are Particles Real?

VIII. Epilogue
Appendix
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author

About the Author

Keith Francis was a teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City for over thirty years, teaching physics, chemistry, mathematics and music. He divides his time between New York and the Berkshires of Massachusetts.