Week 4 (March 30)

Readings (49 pages total):

Chapter 9: A Late Erotic Outburst (pp. 201-224)

Chapter 10: Uncertainty in Copenhagen (pp. 225-249)

Please refer to the Reading Guide for details on readings and Points to Ponder (also below)

Chapter 9: A Late Erotic Outburst – Points to ponder

- - Note the comment on p. 205 that the creative life of a theoretical physicist is generally over at age 30. Why should that be so?

- - Schrödinger’s math works, so why worry so much about the interpretation?

- - Disregarding what physics might say about nature, do you prefer a deterministic or world or one based on causality? Why?

Chapter 10: Uncertainty in Copenhagen – Points to ponder

- - On p. 226, Einstein is quotes as saying: “it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory that decides what we can observe.” Do you agree or disagree? Why? Can you think of any example to support your viewpoint?

- - Does Bohr’s Complementarity look to you like a deep insight into the nature of things, or a desperate way of taping together two incompatible views of the same object?

Do you agree with Bohr that the “interpretation of the experimental material rests essentially on upon the classical concept”? Is it a matter of adapting the only tools we have? Do you think that a mathematical physicist like Dirac would agree?

Erwin Schrödinger on the sub-atomic world

"As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experiences can ever be “true.” A completely satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be more precise, we can, of course, think it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a “triangular circle,” but much more so than a “winged lion.” "

Schrödinger wave equation with wave Ψ

“Erwin with his psi can do

Calculations quite a few.

But one thing has not been seen:

Just what does psi really mean?”

"Gar Manches rechnet Erwin schon

Mit seiner Wellenfunktion.

Nur wissen möcht’ man gerne wohl

Was man sich dabei vorstell’n soll.”

What is Life, The Physical Aspects of a Living Cell by Erwin Schrödinger

Based on lectures delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943. An excerpt:

"My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature."

James D. Watson and Francis Crick independently cited this book as an inspiration for the work on the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.