Even in the early days of quantum mechanics, the state space (or configurations as they were called at first) was understood to be essential for understanding simple quantum-mechanical problems. In 1929, Nevill Mott showed that "tendency to picture the wave as existing in ordinary three dimensional space, whereas we are really dealing with wave functions in multispace" makes analysis of simple interaction problems more difficult. Mott analyzes α α -particle emission in a cloud chamber. The emission process is isotropic, a spherical wave in quantum mechanics, but the tracks observed are linear.