>Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:
>
> > Now some speculation: Did Einstein object to indeterminacy because he
>was
> > just being stubborn or because he knew Heisenberg was a Nazi?
Einstein's resitsnce to quantum far predated Heisenberg's flirtation with the Nazis.
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.
Oh, yeah? After the 1918 experiment showing that light really did bend around the perihelion of Merucury as Gen Rel predicted, E was asked, but suppose it hadn't? "Then I should have been sorry for the dear Lord," said E. "The theory is correct."
>
>Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics may have been largely
>aesthetic and philosophical, but they were well founded by the standards
>of the era.
Huh? Theyw ere like Mach's objections to atomism, recognized as retrograde and quirky by everyone else who could understand the theories, so _not_ in accord with 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.
Quantum isn't like Bush budget, it's far to strange too be true, it's impossible to grasp how it could be true,a nd yet it is clearly, manifestly, true. It's an awesome predictive engine allowing very fruitful and very exact discoveries into all sorts of areas that you wouldn't think it had anything to do with. But there's no smoke and mirrors, and it's clearly right. One simply can't understand how that could be or what it might mean.
The last 70 years of
>high energy physics has revolved around finding ways to dodge the stuff
>no one really believes.
Right.
>
>The great thing about science is that you don't have to believe anything
>to build stuff like nuclear weapons.
This is a great thing? But with quantum, part of the question involves
figuring out what counts as believing it.
>
>
>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.
He was a very great physicist, just a notch below Einstein. Elitism is pretty common among very brilliant people. I'm not aware of any evidence that H was a racist or an anti-Semite. Btw, I saw him lecture at Tigertown in the 1970s, The auditorium was filled, jammed, and this little wisp of an ancient man tottered to the podium and began to lecture in a heavy German accent just above a whisper, painfully writing equations on the board. I don't think that there were 10 people there who understood a word he said. I was not one of them. Like everyone else, I just wanted to see him.
>
jks
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