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By David Wick
Although quantum mechanics has anticipated a unprecedented variety of phenomena with extraordinary accuracy, it is still debatable. Bohr and Heisenberg said it "a entire conception" in 1927, yet Einstein by no means permitted it, and as past due as 1989 John Bell charged it with dividing the area of physics. David Wick strains the historical past of this controversy and indicates the way it impacts our very belief of what a systematic conception is all about.
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Extra info for The Infamous Boundary: Seven Decades of Heresy in Quantum Physics
Example text
And why should quantities like position or momentum, mere tokens of a soon-tobe-abandoned paradigm, retain precisely their old meanings in a radically new one? " This note commemorates a dispute between Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen, which almost led to a falling out between the two men. Bohr strongly criticized Heisenberg's analysis of his gamma-ray- Uncertainty 41 microscope thought experiment. Heisenberg fought back, then relented. ) Bohr prevailed, and Heisenberg agreed to take back the nub of his thesis at the moment of its publication, writing: ...
The first and most accessible idea is that "complementary phenomena," in which "contrasting pictures" are required, appear only in mutually exclusive situations. Experimental arrangements revealing one or the other are physically incompatible. Bohr may have thought of this dichotomy as discrete, "either-or," but later it was realized that the pictures shade from black to white through gray. Here is the simplest situation revealing this fact. The double-slit experiment brings out the wave aspect of a photon or electron most clearly, while the Wilson cloud chamber (or its later refinements), in which electrons leave beautiful tracks like contrails of jet planes, best reveals particle behavior.
So, after consulting his father, Heisenberg enlisted in a course of studies with the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. Lindemann's ridiculous advice set Heisenberg on the ideal path for an ambitious young scientist in the 1920s. Atomic physics was in a wonderfully confused state, with its only viable theory of obviously transient importance and a storehouse of experiments waiting to be explained. Moreover, Sommerfeld was widely considered to be the best teacher of theoretical physics in Europe.