About Wave Orbital
Wave Orbital is a software company located in beautiful Austin Texas that focuses on making great software. Our motto is "Think About the World in a Different Way" and that guides everything we do. There's not always a right way to do things, and not always a wrong way to do things, but there's always a better way to do things.
Building great software is both an art and a science. We believe that for our customers to enjoy using our software, it is essential that we should enjoy making our software. The software we sell was written because we needed it, or one of our friends needed it. The only reason that we really need is that we will have a lot of fun making making great software, and our friends will enjoy using our software.
Wave Orbital's logo is a Bohr-de Broglie model of an atom, named after
the two 20th century physicists who contributed ideas to that model.
Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen and made contributions to atomic
theory and quantum mechanics for which he won the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1922. Louis de Broglie was born in Dieppe, created the field
of wave mechanics, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929.
The motto of Wave Orbital is "Think About the World in a Different Way" and both of these Nobel Laureates are remembered for developing new perspectives and ideas about the nature of matter. De Broglie in particular was the first to realize that ordinary matter - electrons, protons, and neutrons - was both a particle and a wave. Niels Bohr added to that by discovering that matter can behave like a particle or like a wave, but not by both at the same time. Great leaps of thought by these and other great minds turned our view of the stuff around us upside-down and united the physics of light and matter.
The Wave Orbital logo also has another meaning. There have been a few ideas about what atoms looked like, going back to the ancient Greek idea that atoms were simple miniscule specks of matter. The image of the atom familiar to most of us is the Rutherford atomic model, as depicted on the logo of the Atomic Energy Commission.
The Rutherford model was developed from experimental evidence that most of the mass of the atom is concentrated in a nucleus, with electrons orbiting some distance away. Additional discoveries showed weaknesses in that view of the atom, and it was soon replaced by the Bohr-de Broglie model of the atom. However, that view of the atom which depicted the dual nature of electrons as particles and waves in orbit around a nucleus was also superceded by an even better model of the atom, the space filling atomic orbital function.
The lesson that Wave Orbital takes from our logo is that a healthy view of the world is not in terms of black and white; right or wrong. The course of progress is to find a better idea, not the best idea. A mind that is thinking of the world in a different way is a mind that is always striving for a new point of view. But just as Rutherford's ideas were improved on, Bohr and de Broglie found their ideas improved on too. So, that the Wave Orbital logo is an obsolete atomic model is a constant reminder that we must not be so attached to our own ideas that we are not open to better ideas around us.