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The noisy birth of quantum mechanics
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/arts/2007/08/16/boseg112.xml
[Linked by Arts & Letters Daily.]
7.8.16

Kenan Malik reviews Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segre

Some scientific theories are beautiful in their elegant simplicity.
'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that,' Thomas Huxley
said when Darwin explained to him his theory of natural selection.
Other theories are so baffling that their beauty often expresses
itself in the estrangement from everyday experience.

And few theories are stranger than quantum mechanics, the study of
the inner world of the atom. As scientists started peering into the
atom in the first decades of the last century they found a kind of
universe in which the normal rules of physics did not apply. Even
the very idea of causality seemed under threat in the quantum world.
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Unlike Darwinism, and indeed unlike the other great revolution of
20th-century physics, Einstein's theory of relativity, the quantum
revolution was the product not of a single mind, but a collaborative
work involving some of the greatest minds of the 20th century, such
as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger.

At the centre of the group was Niels Bohr, whose importance lay as
much in his ability to provide an atmosphere conducive to
collaboration as in his theoretical work itself. Thanks to Bohr,
Copenhagen became the centre of the quantum universe.

At the edge of that universe hovered Einstein. He was revered by all
the quantum physicists, but he was also deeply suspicious of what
has come to be called the 'Copenhagen interpretation'. 'God doesn't
play dice,' he said in explaining his lifelong refusal to accept any
model of the quantum world that undermined the principle of
causality.

Faust in Copenhagen is a group portrait of the collaboration out of
which quantum physics emerged. Gino Segrè is a distinguished
physicist. His uncle, Emilio Segrè, was a Nobel Prize winner and
had, in the late 1930s, been part of the Copenhagen group, albeit
peripherally. Yet the physics of quantum mechanics plays only a
minor role in this book. What interests Segrè is the context of
scientific discovery, both personal and cultural. This is both the
strength and the weakness of his book.

The Faust of the title refers to a skit which younger members of the
group organised at the end of a conference in 1932, reworking
Goethe's story as a parable about quantum physics. The skit forms a
centrepiece of the book, and Segrè returns to it again and again. It
is misleading, though, because the book is not about Faustian pacts
nor about the dilemmas of nuclear physics.

Rather, Faust in Copenhagen provides an engaging glimpse of the
process of scientific discovery. Segrè unravels the tensions and
conflicts within the group, both personal and scientific, and of the
different approaches to the task of making mathematical sense of the
weirdness of the subatomic world.

The author explores the cultural context, too. Quantum mechanics, he
suggests, was part of a broader development in which modernism
overthrew classical concepts. Quantum theories resulted from the
same kind of 'wild experimenting' that also produced James Joyce's
Ulysses, Schoenberg's atonalism and Giorgio de Chirico's landscapes.
In all these cases 'the outer world, carefully described for
hundreds of years, did not seem to match the inner world that was
being uncovered'.

It is certainly tempting to see a link between the physicists'
rejection of classical notions of causality and determinism and the
breakdown of linearity in artistic modernism. The cultural landscape
of the early 20th century may well have helped shape some of the
thinking of quantum physicists (though Segrè does not establish that
this was the case). The strangeness of quantum mechanics is,
however, not a reflection of the cultural context in which the
theories developed - it is simply a reflection of the fact that the
subatomic world is indeed a strange place.

In stressing the background to the quantum revolution, Segrè tends
to neglect the physics. Which is a pity, because the debates about
the Copenhagen interpretation - and in particular about causality
and indeterminacy - have a resonance far beyond quantum mechanics.
>From nuclear fission to silicon chips, the quantum revolution has
helped transform the modern world.

Yet the interpretation of the quantum world developed by Bohr and
his colleagues remains controversial and contested. It is still
nevertheless a debate about the nature of physical reality. If, as
Einstein said, God doesn't play dice with the universe, it's not
because he hasn't read Ulysses.