> Now some speculation: Did Einstein object to indeterminacy because he was
> just being stubborn or because he knew Heisenberg was a Nazi? After all,
> Einstein did give up the universal constant when a Vatican physicist sold
> him on the big bang, so he couldn't have been that pigheaded.
Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics may have been largely aesthetic and philosophical, but they were well founded by the standards of the era. Quantum theory is a little like the Bush budget: when the implications are fully laid out for people, they often don't believe the person explaining it to them is telling the truth. The last 70 years of high energy physics has revolved around finding ways to dodge the stuff no one really believes.
The great thing about science is that you don't have to believe anything to build stuff like nuclear weapons.
I doubt whatever personal opinion Einstein had of Heisenberg was a factor in his scientific judgement. Bohr himself played a far larger part in the "Copenhagen interpretation" which was the more important target of Einstein's Gedankenexperimenten than the uncertainty principle itself, which could have been (and still could turn out to be) a measurement problem rather than a physical reality.
Heisenberg was a great physicist. That neither denies nor excuses that he was elitist, nationalist, possibly racist and certainly willing to coexist with Naziism even though he knew, unlike the average brownshirt, how much damage it was doing to German intellectual life.
Which universal constant did Einstein give up on, and at the behest of which Vatican physicist? The Big Bang wasn't current until after Einstein's death, and wasn't universally accepted until the late 70's at least.
Scott Martens