Einstein Defiant Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution (2004) / Chapter Skim
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25 Admiration and Suspicion
25 Admiration and Suspicion
Pages 241-247
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From page 241... ...
Schrödinger had submitted his article in mid-March.At March's end, an American named Carl Eckart sent a paper to the National Academy of Sciences making the same argument, and in April,Wolfgang Pauli outlined a proof in a private letter to Born's assistant, Pasqual Jordan. Schrödinger's proof took the most peculiar feature of matrix alge 241
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From page 242... ...
Although nobody was having any luck finding physical meanings for the discoveries, mathematical meanings were there for the taking. A grand example of that success lay in the birth of quantum mechanics.
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From page 243... ...
If we begin with the p group, pq = ITEM, but if we begin with the q group, qp = TIME.There is nothing inherently puzzling in this case about pq giving us a different result from qp,but while this mathematical understanding might relieve the feeling that the situation is impossible, it does nothing to explain the reality of what lies behind quantum mechanics. If you take the matrix algebra to be the whole story, normal physical explanations go out the window.There is only a mathematical explanation, just as there is only a mathematical reason for why three oranges priced at 30 cents apiece cost 90 cents.
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From page 244... ...
But Max Born proposed a new way of thinking, one he credited to Einstein's influence. Born was unwilling to abandon material reality quite as thoroughly as Heisenberg did and he appreciated the way Schrödinger's method kept space in physics' story.Yet Born refused to believe that particles were illusions, wave packets that passed themselves off as something more.
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From page 245... ...
Max Born's probability field had no such physical meaning. Born then made an even more radical assertion, saying that in "quantum mechanics there exists no quantity which in an individual case causally determines the effect of a collision.
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From page 246... ...
Like America's whiskey rebels after the establishment of the federal constitution, they grumble that this outcome was not what they were looking for when they enlisted in the sacred cause. Rarely, however, does a living symbol of the revolution resist its settlement quite so ferociously and famously as Einstein resisted this one.He did see much to admire.The new quantum mechanics was a technical achievement of enormous imagination.Whatever finally emerged would have to be just as accurate as the existing mathematics.
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From page 247... ...
It gets us no closer to understanding how and why particles move through space. As he later wrote, he feared that the emerging quantum mechanics offered "no useful departure for future development." If quantum mechanics was a step, Einstein feared it was a stride into a box canyon and could never lead to an understanding of what lay at the heart of the universe.
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