Einstein Defiant Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution (2004) / Chapter Skim
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28 Indeterminacy
28 Indeterminacy
Pages 256-263
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From page 256... ...
Bohr was not satisfied, and after Schrödinger's departure he and Heisenberg worked intently together in an effort to gain a practical understanding of quantum physics through and through. As Denmark's nights lengthened, the two spent more and more time talking about how the physics worked.They struggled logically through one experiment after another, figuring out its math and what the solution suggested about the physics of the event.
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From page 257... ...
At the same time, they stimulated so many thoughts in the other that the moment the two separated, their minds erupted with fruitful ideas. Bohr left Heisenberg alone at the end of February 1927, when he set off to vacation in Norway, and immediately ideas began to blossom.Heisenberg continued thinking about quantum experiments and how to understand them, but with Bohr gone, Heisenberg suddenly recalled Einstein saying that "Theory determines what we observe," and he decided to see what his theory observed.
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From page 258... ...
Such quarreling over interpretation was one of the things science had seemed to abolish. Philosophers had once argued interminably about the interpretation of the most elementary facts, but science after Galileo and Newton made tremendous strides by somehow limiting that tendency.
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From page 259... ...
A mathematical view might be that we can know only the probable values of qp, not its exact value, but Heisenberg did look for underlying physical reasons. His most famous example envisioned an experiment in which a physicist tries to look at an electron through a gamma-ray microscope.
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From page 260... ...
Finally, Heisenberg's paper beat a retreat from Max Born's radical insistence on probabilities. Heisenberg ended his paper with the remark, "Quantum mechanics establishes the final failure of causality." That sounds plenty radical, but a few sentences earlier Heisenberg had undermined this stance by explaining that the error lies in believing that "When we know the present precisely, we can predict the future." We cannot predict the future because we cannot know the present precisely.That is much tamer than Max Born's doctrine that we cannot predict the future because the present is free to act as it chooses.
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From page 261... ...
to compare quantum theory with special relativity." Heisenberg then went on to compare Einstein's idea that nothing can be absolutely simultaneous with his own notion that position is uncertain. Heisenberg liked the claim, but it missed Einstein's achievement of removing ambiguity from his account of physical phenomena.Bohr had an idea for removing all ambiguity from quantum phenomena as well, and he wanted Heisenberg to hold off publication until that idea could be included.
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From page 262... ...
If p and q referred to Newtonian concepts of position and momentum, you could not get a complete Newtonian picture of quantum behavior. Or if p and q symbolized thermodynamic notions of time and energy, you could not get a complete thermodynamic picture of quantum change.
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From page 263... ...
Heisenberg did not pull his paper from publication, but he did add a passage to its closing. He retreated from a few positions, notably, admitting that the gamma-ray experiment is "not so simple as was assumed." Mostly the effect of Heisenberg's addendum was like the "to be continued"ending in a serialized Charles Dickens episode.Much wonder and amazement was inspired by the chapter in print, and yet it served largely to make readers pace eagerly in anticipation of what would come next."I owe great thanks to Professor Bohr," Heisenberg concluded,"for sharing with me at an early stage the results of these more recent investigations of his -- to appear soon in a paper on the conceptual structure of quantum theory -- and for discussing them with me." With these words, Heisenberg put the quantum revolution on hold until Bohr's paper should "appear soon." And everybody knew that Bohr was a slow writer.
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