"Possibly," Einstein said, "but it is nonsense all the same." Heisenberg: "Isn't that precisely what you have done with relativity?" He was confronted with his own youthful rebelliousness. Now he was a defender of Newton, of rigorous causality and (by implication) the established order.Įinstein: "You don't seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?" Two decades earlier he had "toppled many of the pillars of Newton's universe, including absolute space and time," Isaacson writes. On the 200th anniversary of Newton's death, in 1927, Einstein defended classical mechanics. When Einstein objected, Heisenberg confidently replied: "I believe that indeterminism, that is, the non-validity of rigorous causality, is necessary." In denying that there is an objective reality out there, it undermined classical physics. This was a feature of the universe, he claimed, not just some deficiency in our ability to measure. Heisenberg insisted that an electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it. Here you will learn, painlessly, a good deal more than that. Most of us know little more than that Heisenberg enunciated an uncertainty principle, wherein observation affects the thing observed to which Einstein retorted that God does not play dice. He covers it in about 40 lucid pages, encompassing the contributions of Erwin Schroedinger and others. If you are unfamiliar with that controversy, there could be no better introduction than Isaacson's. This was reflected above all in his prolonged and unresolved dispute with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about quantum mechanics. Posted by Orrin Judd at 11:33 PM NOTHING'S RELATIVE:Įinstein's Revolution, and Counterrevolution (Tom Bethell, June 2007, The American Spectator)Ī BASIC POINT ABOUT EINSTEIN'S life (1879-1955) is that he became more conservative when he reached middle age not so much politically - he remained a man of the left to the end - but in his scientific outlook.
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