When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

Author:Benjamín Labatut
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

On returning to the University of Göttingen, Heisenberg fought to shape his epiphany into a publishable article. The final paper struck him as flimsy, if not downright absurd. Its pages spoke of neither orbits nor trajectories, of positions nor velocities; all of that had been replaced by a complex web of numbers governed by a set of mathematical rules so convoluted as to appear repulsive. The simplest calculation required a titanic effort, and, even for him, it was practically impossible to decipher the connection between his own matrices and the real world. And yet they worked. Too insecure to publish the paper, he handed it to Niels Bohr, who left it on his desk for weeks.

The Dane began to leaf through it one morning when he had nothing better to do, then reread it again and again, his fascination growing all the while. Soon Heisenberg’s new discovery occupied his mind so fully that it kept him up at night. What the young German had achieved had no precedents: it was like deducing all the rules of Wimbledon—the number of sets, the length of the grass, the tension of the nets and even the mandatory white that players have to wear—from the few balls that flew out of the stadium, without ever having witnessed what takes place on the court. Hard as he tried, Bohr could not tease out the strange logic that Heisenberg had employed in the creation of his matrices, but he knew the young man had hit on something fundamental. The first thing he did was notify Einstein: “Heisenberg’s latest paper, soon to be published, appears rather mystifying but is certainly true and profound and will have enormous implications.”

In September 1925, Heisenberg published “On a Quantum-Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations”, in Issue 33 of the Zeitschrift für Physik, the first formulation of quantum mechanics.

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