The Dice of God: Einstein, Heisenberg, and Robert Coover
Arlen J. Hansen
The Fifth Solvay Conference, in Brussels in 1927, was a watershed in the history of modern physics. It separated the old revolutionaries from the young. There was Einstein, the inspiration of them all, the man who had upended the world by his startling discoveries twenty years earlier. Maintaining that classical mechanics could not explain the behavior of electromagnetic and light phenomena, had posited a relativistic mechanics and had confirmed it with his own application of non-Euclidean geometry. Newton's mechanics works here, said in effect, but not there, pointing to the electromagnetic phenomena addressed by Maxwell's theories. So, in one sense, Einstein's work in relativity was conservative: it salvaged much of Newton's theory by discovering the limits of its applicability. It may not be surprising, therefore, to find on the conservative side of the watershed in 1927. The young Turks, on the other side, clustered around the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr. Sometimes referred to as the Copenhagen group, Bohr, Max Born, and a young German, Werner Heisenberg, proposed some profoundly radical ideas-some inconceivable ideas which challenged the human imagination. The point of contention between and the Copenhagen group lay in the fact that quantum theory as developed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and others provides knowledge that is probabilistic. In Physics and Beyond Heisenberg recalls that Einstein would not admit that it was impossible, even in principle, to discover all the partial facts needed for a complete description of a physical process (New York, 1971, p. 80; hereafter PAB). Just prior to the 1927 conference Heisenberg had shown that knowing the location of an electron to a given degree of precision
NOVEL A Forum on Fiction•Jan 1, 1976•3 citations