Einstein Defiant Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution (2004) / Chapter Skim
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24 Adding Two Nonsenses
24 Adding Two Nonsenses
Pages 236-240
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From page 236... ...
In the arts, however, particularly in literature, the fruit was sometimes more satisfying. Proust's first volume tells of a certain Monsieur Swann who traveled in France's most elegant circles,dining at the Jockey Club,playing cards with the Prince of Wales, and yet never speaking of these connections.His neighbors in the small town of Combray have no idea of the distinguished company he keeps.
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From page 237... ...
He was born in the late nineteenth century, when meaningful systems appeared triumphant: Species had been linked through an evolutionary history, chemical elements through a periodic chart, and even the impulses of the mind through a psychoanalytic theory. Bohr had no instinct for such systematic thinking, as was probably best shown in his distaste for mathematics.
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From page 238... ...
"The most important question seems to me," Pauli wrote Bohr, "to be this: to what extent may definite orbits of electrons in the stationary states be spoken of at all. I believe this can in no way be assumed as selfevident." By getting rid of geometry, the new quantum mechanics abolished Bohr's famous electron orbits and jumps just as decisively as Schrödinger's wave mechanics would do.Yet Bohr embraced it all, and without a fight.
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From page 239... ...
Heisenberg once said, "I learned optimism from Sommerfeld, mathematics in Göttingen, and physics from Bohr." And the physics that Bohr taught was the unambiguous, unrealistic variety.Theoretical contradictions -- Einstein's key to progress -- were not a worry to Bohr. He later recalled that in those days of struggle, when nothing worked, his students at the Institute consoled themselves with the joke that along with "statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended" there were also "`deep truths' in which the opposite also contains deep truth." Bohr looked for this attitude in students.
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From page 240... ...
Bohr was explicit about his preference for nonquantitative physics.When he was finally persuaded to publicly endorse the concept of electron spin, he wrote that spin "opens up a very hopeful prospect of our being able to account more extensively for the properties of elements by means of mechanical models, at least in a qualitative way characteristic of applications of the correspondence principle." As so often the case with Bohr's remarks, this passage's meaning seems to dissolve when examined closely, but we can get its sprit. Spin offers hope of more qualitative understanding, and more support for the beloved "magic wand," the correspondence principle.
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