PHYSICS AND BEYOND PHYSICS AND BEYOND WERNER HEISENBERG HARPER & ROWPHYSICS AND BEYOND Encounters and ConversationsIl Iv VI Vil VIIL IX XIL XII XIV XV XVI XVIL WORLD PERSPECTIVES Volumes already published APPROACHES To Gop Jacques Maritain ACCENT ON Form Lancelot Law Whyte Score or Tota ARcHITECTURE Walter Gropius Recovery oF Farr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Wor tp INpIvIsIBLE Konrad Adenauer Society AND KNOWLEDGE V. Gordon Childe ‘Tur TRANSFORMATIONS OF MaN Lewis Mumford MAN AND MATERIALISM Fred Hoyle ‘Tue Art oF Lovinc Erich Fromm Dynamics oF Farr Paul Tillich MArrer, Mino AND MAN Edmund W. Sinnott MysticisM: CHRISTIAN AND Buppitist Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki Man's Western Quest Denis de Rougemont AMERICAN HUMANISM Howard Mumford Jones ‘Tue MeetiNc or Love aNp KNOWLEDGE Martin C. D'Arcy, S.J. Richt Lanps AND Poor Gunnar Myrdal HinbutsM: ITs MEANING FoR THE LIBERATION OF THE SPIRIT Swami Nikhilananda Can Propte LEARN To LEARN? Brock Chisholm Prysics ND PHILosoPHy Werner Heisenberg Arr ano REALITY Joyce Cary SicMuND Freup’s Mission Erich Fromm Mirace or Heacta René Dubos Issues oF FREEDOM Herbert J. Muller HUMANISM Moses Hadas Lire: Its DIMENSIONS AND Its Bounps Robert M. MaclverXXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXIL XXXII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVI XXXIX XL XLI XLIL Ciattece or Psycuicat Researcu Gardner Murphy ALrrep NorTH WHITEHEAD: His REFLECTIONS ON MAN AND NATURE Ruth Nanda Anshen TE AcE or NATIONALISM Hans Kohn Voices of MAN Mario Pei New Patus in Brotocy Adolf Portmann Myru ano Reauity Mircea Eliade History as ArT AND As SciENcE _H. Stuart Hughes REALIsM IN Our TIME Georg Lukacs ‘Tue MEAnine or THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Kenneth E, Boulding On Economic KNowLencE Adolph Lowe Catan Reporn Wilfrid Mellers ‘TuroucH THE VANisHING Pont Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker ‘Tue Revotution or Hore Erich Fromm EMercENcy Exit Ignazio Silone Manxis AND THE ExIstentiatists Raymond Aron PrystcaL CONTROL OF THE MIND. José M. R. Delgado, M.D. Priysics AND BEYOND Werner HeisenbergBOARD OF EDITORS of WORLD PERSPECTIVES Lorp KENNETH CLARK RicHarp CourANT ‘WERNER HEISENBERG Ivan ILLicH Konrap Lorenz JosepH NEEDHAM LI. Ras SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN Karu Rauner, S.J. ALEXANDER SACHS C.N. YANGWORLD PERSPECTIVES Volume Forty-two Planned and Edited by RUTH NANDA ANSHEN PHYSICS AND BEYOND ENCOUNTERS AND CONVERSATIONS WERNER HEISENBERG Translated from the German by Arnold J. Pomerans #. 1817 HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, EVANSTON, AND LONDONPHYSICS AND BEYOND: ENCOUNTERS AND CONVERSATIONS. Copyright © 1971 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America, No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 49 East ggrd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto. FIRST EDITION LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 78-95963% oO Rw Cowra Contents Wortp Perspectives—What This Series Means ix —Ruth Nanda Anshen Preface xvii First Encounter with the Atomic Concept (1919-1920) 1 ‘The Decision to Study Physics (1920) 15 “Understanding” in Modern Physics (1920-1922) 27 Lessons in Politics and History (1922-1924) 43 Quantum Mechanics and a Talk with Einstein (1925-1926) 58 Fresh Fields (1926-1927) 70 Science and Religion (1927) 82 Atomic Physics and Pragmatism (1929) 93 The Relationship between Biology, Physics and Chemistry (1930-1932) 103 Quantum Mechanics and Kantian Philosophy (1930-1934) 117 Discussions about Language (1933) 125 Revolution and University Life (1933) 141 Atomic Power and Elementary Particles (1935-1937) 155CONTENTS Individual Behavior in the Face of Political Disaster (1937-1941) Toward a New Beginning (1941-1945) ‘The Responsibility of the Scientist (1945-1950) Positivism, Metaphysics and Religion (1952) Scientific and Political Disputes (1956-1957) The Unified Field Theory (1957-1958) Elementary Particles and Platonic Philosophy (1961-1965) 165 1g2 205 218 230 237WORLD PERSPECTIVES What This Series Means It is the thesis of World Perspectives that man is in the process of developing a new consciousness which, in spite of his apparent spiritual and moral captivity, can eventually lift the human race above and beyond the fear, ignorance, and isolation which beset it today. It is to this nascent consciousness, to this concept of man born out of a universe perceived through a fresh vision of reality, that World Perspectives is dedicated. Man has entered a new era of evolutionary history, one in which rapid change is a dominant consequence. He is contending with a fundamental change, since he has intervened in the evolu- tionary process. He must now better appreciate this fact and then develop the wisdom to direct the process toward his fulfillment rather than toward his destruction. As he learns to apply his understanding of the physical world for practical purposes, he is, in reality, extending his innate capacity and augmenting his ability and his need to communicate as well as his ability to think and to create. And as a result, he is substituting a goal- directed evolutionary process in his struggle against environ- mental hardship for the slow, but effective, biological evolution which produced modern man through mutation and natural selection, By intelligent intervention in the evolutionary process man has greatly accelerated and greatly expanded the range of his possibilities. But he has not changed the basic fact that it remains a trial and error process, with the danger of taking paths that lead to sterility of mind and heart, moral apathy and intellectual inertia; and even producing social dinosaurs unfit to live in an evolving world. Only those spiritual and intellectual leaders of our epoch who have a paternity in this extension of man’s horizons are invited to participate in this Series: those who are aware of the truth thatx ‘WORLD PERSPECTIVES beyond the divisiveness among men there exists a primordial unitive power since we are all bound together by a common humanity more fundamental than any unity of dogma; those who recognize that the centrifugal force which has scattered and atomized mankind must be replaced by an integrating structure and process capable of bestowing meaning and purpose on existence; those who realize that science itself, when not in- hibited by the limitations of its own methodology, when chas- tened and humbled, commits man to an indeterminate range of yet undreamed consequences that may flow from it. Virtually all of our disciplines have relied on conceptions which are now incompatible with the Cartesian axiom, and with the static world view we once derived from it. For underlying the new ideas, including those of modern physics, is a unifying order, but it is not causality; it is purpose, and not the purpose of the universe and of man, but the purpose in the universe and in man. In other words, we seem to inhabit a world of dynamic process and structure. Therefore we need a calculus of potential ity rather than one of probability, a dialectic of polarity, one in which unity and diversity are redefined as simultaneous and necessary poles of the same essence. Our situation is new. No civilization has previously had to face the challenge of scientific specialization, and our response must be new. Thus this Series is committed to ensure that the spiritual and moral needs of man as a human being and the scientific and intellectual resources at his command for life may be brought into a productive, meaningful and creative harmony. In a certain sense we may say that man now has regained his former geocentric position in the universe. For a picture of the Earth has been made available from distant space, from the lunar desert, and the sheer isolation of the Earth has become plain. This is as new and as powerful an idea in history as any that has ever been born in man’s consciousness. We are all becoming seriously concerned with our natural environment. And this concern is not only the result of the warnings given by biologists, ecologists and conservationists. Rather it is the result of a deepening awareness that something new has happened, that the planet Earth is a unique and precious place. Indeed, it may not be a mere coincidence that this awareness should have beenWORLD PERSPECTIVES xi born at the exact moment when man took his first step into outer space. This Series endeavors to point to a reality of which scientific theory has revealed only one aspect. It is the commitment to this reality that lends universal intent to a scientist's most original and solitary thought. By acknowledging this frankly we shall restore science to the great family of human aspirations by which men hope to fulfill themselves in the world community as thinking and sentient beings. For our problem is to discover a principle of differentiation and yet relationship lucid enough to justify and to purify scientific, philosophic and all other knowl- edge, both discursive and intuitive, by accepting their interde- pendence. This is the crisis in consciousness made articulate through the crisis in science. This is the new awakening. Each volume presents the thought and belief of its author and points to the way in which religion, philosophy, art, science, economics, politics and history may constitute that form of human activity which takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty. Thus World Perspectives endeavors to define that ecumenical power of the mind and heart which enables man through his mysterious great- ness to re-create his life. This Series is committed to a re-examination of all those sides of human endeavor which the specialist was taught to believe he could safely leave aside. It attempts to show the structural kin- ship between subject and object; the indwelling of the one in the other. It interprets present and past events impinging on human life in our growing World Age and envisages what man may yet attain when summoned by an unbending inner necessity to the quest of what is most exalted in him. Its purpose is to offer new vistas in terms of world and human development while refusing to betray the intimate correlation between universality and individuality, dynamics and form, freedom and destiny. Each author deals with the increasing realization that spirit and nature are not separate and apart; that intuition and reason must regain their importance as the means of perceiving and fusing inner being with outer reality. World Perspectives endeavors to show that the conception of wholeness, unity, organism is a higher and more concrete concep-xii ‘WORLD PERSPECTIVES tion than that of matter and energy. Thus an enlarged meaning of life, of biology, not as it is revealed in the test tube of the laboratory but as it is experienced within the organism of life itself, is attempted in this Series. For the principle of life consists in the tension which connects spirit with the realm of matter, symbiotically joined. The element of life is dominant in the very texture of nature, thus rendering life, biology, a transempirical science. The laws of life have their origin beyond their mere physical manifestations and compel us to consider their spiritual source. In fact, the widening of the conceptual framework has not only served to restore order within the respective branches of knowledge, but has also disclosed analogies in man’s position regarding the analysis and synthesis of experience in apparently separated domains of knowledge, suggesting the possibility of an ever more embracing objective description of the meaning of life. Knowledge, it is shown in these books, no longer consists in a manipulation of man and nature as opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a means of liberating mankind from the destructive power of fear, pointing the way toward the goal of the rehabilitation of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in the human person. The works published also endeavor to reveal that the cry for patterns, systems and authorities is growing less insistent as the desire grows stronger in both East and West for the recovery of a dignity, integrity and self-realization which are the inalienable rights of man who may now guide change by means of conscious purpose in the light of rational experience. The volumes in this Series endeavor to demonstrate that only in a society in which awareness of the problems of science exists can its discoveries start great waves of change in human culture, and in such a manner that these discoveries may deepen and not erode the sense of universal human community. The differences in the disciplines, their epistemological exclusiveness, the variety of historical experiences, the differences of traditions, of cultures, of languages, of the arts, should be protected and preserved. But the interrelationship and unity of the whole should at the same time be accepted. The authors of World Perspectives are of course aware that theWORLD PERSPECTIVES xiii ultimate answers to the hopes and fears which pervade modern society rest on the moral fibre of man, and on the wisdom and responsibility of those who promote the course of its develop- ment. But moral decisions cannot dispense with an insight into the interplay of the objective elements which offer and limit the choices made. Therefore an understanding of what the issues are, though not a sufficient condition, is a necessary prerequisite for directing action toward constructive solutions. Other vital questions explored relate to problems of interna- tional understanding as well as to problems dealing with preju- dice and the resultant tensions and antagonisms. The growing perception and responsibility of our World Age point to the new reality that the individual person and the collective person supplement and integrate each other; that the thrall of totali- tarianism of both left and right has been shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of truth and human totality. Mankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authori- tarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacra- mental brotherhood and in the unity of knowledge. This new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought com- parable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets; analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or to the beginning of the new scientific era, the era of the science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance. An important effort of this Series is to re-examine the contra- dictory meanings and applications which are given today to such terms as democracy, freedom, justice, love, peace, brotherhood and God. The purpose of such inquiries is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine world history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of man in relation to God, to himself, his fellow man and the universe, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For the meaning of the World Age con- sists in respecting man’s hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples.xiv ‘WORLD PERSPECTIVES World Perspectives is planned to gain insight into the mean- ing of man, who not only is determined by history but who also determines history. History is to be understood as concerned not only with the life of man on this planet but as including also such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our human world. This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that the organization of human communities and the establishment of freedom and peace are not only intellectual achievements but spiritual and moral achievements as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of human personality, the “unmediated wholeness of feeling and thought,” and constituting a never-ending challenge to man, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffer- ing, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of his life. Justice itself, which has been “in a state of pilgrimage and crucifixion” and now is being slowly liberated from the grip of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in the West, begins to question its own premises. The modern revolu- tionary movements which have challenged the sacred institutions of society by protesting social injustice in the name of social justice are here examined and re-evaluated. In the light of this, we have no choice but to admit that the un- freedom against which freedom is measured must be retained with it, namely, that the aspect of truth out of which the night view appears to emerge, the darkness of our time, is as little abandon- able as is man’s subjective advance. Thus the two sources of man's consciousness are inseparable, not as dead but as living and complementary, an aspect of that “principle of complemen- tarity” through which Niels Bohr has sought to unite the quan- tum and the wave, both of which constitute the very fabric of life’s radiant energy. There is in mankind today a counterforce to the sterility and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture; a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward human and world unity on the basis of the sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality may not be evaluated in mere numerical terms but is proportionate and analogical in its real- ity. For when equality is equated with interchangeability, indi- viduality is negated and the human person extinguished.WORLD PERSPECTIVES xv We stand at the brink of an age of a world in which human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false separation of man and nature, of time and space, of freedom and security, is acknowledged, and we are faced with a new vision of man in his organic unity and of history offering a richness and diversity of quality and majesty of scope hitherto unprecedented. In relat- ing the accumulated wisdom of man’s spirit to the new reality of the World Age, in articulating its thought and belief, World Perspectives seeks to encourage a renaissance of hope in society and of pride in man’s decision as to what his destiny will be. World Perspectives is committed to the recognition that all great changes are preceded by a vigorous intellectual re-evalua- tion and reorganization. Our authors are aware that the sin of hubris may be avoided by showing that the creative process itself is not a free activity if by free we mean arbitrary, or unrelated to cosmic law. For the creative process in the human mind, the developmental process in organic nature and the basic laws of the inorganic realm may be but varied expressions of a universal formative process. Thus World Perspectives hopes to show that although the present apocalyptic period is one of exceptional tensions, there is also at work an exceptional movement toward a compensating unity which refuses to violate the ultimate moral power at work in the universe, that very power upon which all human effort must at last depend. In this way we may come to understand that there exists an inherent independence of spir- itual and mental growth which, though conditioned by circum- stances, is never determined by circumstances. In this way the great plethora of human knowledge may be correlated with an insight into the nature of human nature by being attuned to the wide and deep range of human thought and human experience. Incoherence is the result of the present disintegrative processes in education. Thus the need for World Perspectives expresses itself in the recognition that natural and man-made ecological systems require as much study as isolated particles and elemen- tary reactions. For there is a basic correlation of elements in nature as in man which cannot be separated, which compose each other and alter each other mutually. Thus we hope to widen appropriately our conceptual framework of reference. For our epistemological problem consists in our finding the proper bal- ance between our lack of an all-embracing principle relevant toxvi WORLD PERSPECTIVES our way of evaluating life and in our power to express ourselves in a logically consistent manner. Our Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritage, our Hellenic tradition, has compelled us to think in exclusive categories. But our experience challenges us to recognize a totality richer and far more complex than the average observer could have suspected— a totality which compels him to think in ways which the logic of dichotomies denies. We are summoned to revise fundamentally our ordinary ways of conceiving experience, and thus, by ex- panding our vision and by accepting those forms of thought which also include nonexclusive categories, the mind is then able to grasp what it was incapable of grasping or accepting before. In spite of the infinite obligation of men and in spite of their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of nationalisms, and in spite of the homelessness of moral passions rendered ineffectual by the scientific outlook, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding of a world-consciousness, the purpose of World Perspectives is to help quicken the “unshaken heart of well-rounded truth” and interpret the significant ele- ments of the World Age now taking shape out of the core of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which restores man to mankind while deepening and enhancing his communion with the universe. RutH NANDA ANSHENPreface Now, in what concerns these orations . . . 1 have found it impossible to remember their exact wording. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech. —Txucyoiwes Science is made by men, a self-evident fact that is far too often forgotten, If it is recalled here, it is in the hope of reducing the gap between the two cultures, between art and science. The present book deals with the developments of atomic physics dur- ing the past fifty years, as the author has experienced them. Science rests on experiments; its results are attained through talks among those who work in it and who consult one another about their interpretation of these experiments. Such talks form the main content of this book. Through them the author hopes to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations. Needless to say, conversations cannot be reconstructed literally after sev- eral decades. Nor is the book intended as a collection of memoirs. Instead, the author has freely condensed and sacrificed certain details; all he wishes to reconstruct is the broader picture. In these conversations atomic physics does not invariably play the most important role—far from it. Human, philosophical or po- litical problems will crop up time and again, and the author hopes to show that science is quite inseparable from these more general questions.xviii PHYSICS AND BEYOND Many of the dramatis personae are referred to by first name, partly because they are not known to the general public, and partly because the author’s relationship to them is best conveyed in that way. Moreover, this should help to avoid the impression that the author is presenting a verbatim report, true in every detail. For that reason there has been no attempt to draw a more precise picture of these personalities; they can, as it were, be recognized only from their manner of speech. Careful attention, however, has been paid to the precise atmosphere in which the conversations took place. For in it the creative process of science is made manifest; it helps to explain how the cooperation of different people may culminate in scientific results of the utmost importance. The author will be most happy, if, in this way, he can convey even to those remote from atomic physics some idea of the mental processes that have gone into the genesis and develop- ment of that science, and this despite the fact that he has been obliged to introduce some highly abstract and complex mathe- matical relations. And finally, by recalling these conversations, the author has tried to pursue an even wider objective. Modern atomic physics has thrown fresh light on basic philosophical, ethical and politi- cal problems. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that this book may help to draw the largest possible circle of people into this vital discussion.1 First Encounter with the Atomic Concept (1919-1920) It must have been in the spring of 1920. The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into a great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillu- sioned older generation, and the younger one drew together in an attempt to blaze new paths, or at least to discover a new star by which they could guide their steps in the prevailing darkness. And so, one bright spring morning, some ten to twenty of us, most of them younger than myself, set out on a ramble which, if I remember correctly, took us through the hills above the western shore of Lake Starnberg. Through gaps in the dense emerald screen of beech we caught occasional glimpses of the lake be- neath, and of tall mountains in the far distance. It was here that Ihad my first conversation about that world of atoms which was to play so important a part in my subsequent life. To explain why a group of young nature lovers, enraptured by the glorious spring landscape, should have engaged in such conversations in the first place, I ought perhaps to point out that the cocoon in which home and school protect the young in more peaceful periods had burst open in the confusion of the times, and that, by way of a substitute, we had discovered a new sense of freedom and did not think twice about offering views on even such sub- jects as called for much more basic information than any of us possessed. Just a few steps in front of me walked a fair, tall boy whose parents had once asked me to help him with his homework. A2 PHYSICS AND BEYOND year earlier, at the age of fifteen, this boy had been dragging up ammunition for his father, who was manning a machine gun behind the Wittelsbach Fountain. Those were the days of the Soviet Republic in Munich. Others, including myself, had been working as farm laborers in the Bavarian Highlands. And so a rough life was not entirely alien to us; and we were not afraid to form opinions on the most abstruse topics. Our talk probably turned to atoms because I was preparing for my matriculation in the summer, and hence liked to discuss scientific subjects with my friend Kurt, who shared my interests and hoped to become an engineer. Kurt came from a Protestant officer's family; he was a good sportsman and an excellent com- rade. The year before, when Munich had been surrounded by government troops and our families had long since eaten their last piece of bread, he, my brother and I had gone on a foraging expedition to Garching, right through the front lines, and had returned with a rucksack full of bread, butter and bacon. Such shared experiences make for trust and happy understanding. I now told Kurt that I had come across an illustration in my physics book that made no sense to me at all. It was meant to depict the basic chemical process of two uniform substances combining into a third uniform substance, i.e., into a chemical compound, The processes involved, so the book contended, were best explained by the assumption that the smallest particles, or atoms, of either element, combined into small groups of atoms, called molecules. A carbon dioxide molecule, for instance, was said to consist of an atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen, It was this process which our book tried to illustrate. And in order to explain why it was that precisely one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen formed a carbon dioxide molecule, the artist had furnished the atoms with hooks and eyes, by which they could hang together. I found this approach wholly unacceptable. To my mind, hooks and eyes were quite arbitrary structures whose shape could be altered at will to adapt them to different technical tasks, whereas atoms and their combination into mole- cules were supposed to be governed by strict natural laws. This, I felt, left no room for such human inventions as hooks and eyes. “If you do not hold with hooks and eyes—and I think them fairly suspect myself—you should nevertheless try to get at the particular experiences which persuaded the artist to use this typeFIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE ATOMIC CONCEPT 3 of representation,” Kurt contended. “For modern science starts from experience and not from philosophical speculation. Experi- ence is all we have to go by, provided only we have gathered it with due care. As far as I know, chemists have shown that the elementary particles of a chemical compound are always repre- sented in a fixed ratio by weight. That is remarkable in itself. For even if one believes in the existence of atoms, i.e., the char- acteristic particles of every chemical element, forces of the kind we normally encounter in nature would hardly suffice to explain why a carbon atom invariably and exclusively attracts two oxy- gen atoms and binds them to itself. Even if we grant the existence of some kind of attractive force between the two types of atom, how can we explain why a carbon atom should never combine with three instead of the usual two oxygen atoms?” “Perhaps the carbon and oxygen atoms have such shapes that the combination of three is impossible for spatial reasons alone.” “If you assume that, and it seems a plausible enough idea, then you are back with much the same things as the hooks and eyes of your textbook. Perhaps the artist wanted to express just that, for he, too, had no idea what atoms really look like. He simply drew hooks and eyes in order to drive home the point that there are forms which lend themselves to the union of two but never of three oxygen atoms with one of carbon.” “Very well, the hooks and eyes have no real meaning. But you claim that the natural laws responsible for the existence of atoms also endow them with just the form that will ensure the right kind of combination. Unfortunately, neither of us is familiar with that form, nor, for that matter, was the illustrator of the textbook. The only thing we can say is that it is thanks to this form that one carbon atom combines with two rather than three oxygen atoms. The chemists, as the book tells us, have invented the concept of ‘valence’ for this very purpose. But it remains to be seen whether ‘valence’ is just a word or a truly useful concept.” “It is probably more than just a word; for in the case of the carbon atom the four valence bonds it is said to have—pairs of which are assumed to join up with the two bonds of each oxygen atom—must somehow be related to its tetrahedral form. There is little doubt, therefore, that the valence concept is based on em- pirical fact, much more so than we can grasp at the moment.” At this point, Robert joined our conversation; he had been4 PHYSICS AND BEYOND walking silently beside us, but had obviously been listening. Robert had a thin but strong face, framed by dark hair, and at first sight looked rather withdrawn. He rarely joined in the sort of flighty conversations we were wont to have on our walks, but at night, whenever readings were held in the tent, or at meal- times when we liked to listen to poetry, we would invariably turn to him, for none of us knew more about German poetry, or, indeed, about the philosophers, than he did. Whenever he recited a poem, he would do so without the least kind of pathos, without any strain, and yet the message of the poet would filter through to even the most sober among us. The quiet way in which he formulated his thoughts, his great composure, forced everyone to listen, and what he said struck us as eminently worth listening to. He had obviously been dissatisfied with our con- versation about atoms. “You science worshipers,” he said, “speak ever so glibly about experience, and all of you believe that it leads straight to the truth. But if you really think about it, if you really consider what happens during an ‘experience,’ you will surely have to revise your opinion. Whatever we say is based on thoughts; only our thoughts are directly known to us. But thoughts are not things. We cannot grasp things directly, we must first transform them into ideas, and then shape these into concepts. What reaches us from the outside is a fairly incoherent mixture of odd sense impressions, and these are by no means directly related to the forms or qualities we perceive a posteriori. If, for instance, we look at a square drawn on a piece of paper, neither our retina nor the nerve cells in our brain register anything like a square. To arrive at that, we must first arrange our sense impressions by an unconscious process that helps to transform them into a co- herent, ‘meaningful’ picture. Only through this transformation, through this fitting together of individual impressions into a ‘comprehensible’ whole, can we claim to have perceived any- thing. Hence we ought to inquire more closely into the origin of the pictures on which our ideas are based, determine how they can be grasped by concepts, and how they are related to things. Only then can we make authoritative judgments about the meaning of experience. For ideas are obviously prior to experi- ence; indeed, they are the prerequisite of all experience!”FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE ATOMIC CONCEPT 5 “But surely the very ideas you are so anxious to distinguish from the objects of perception must spring from experience in their turn? Perhaps not as directly as one might naively believe, but indirectly, for instance by means of frequent repetitions of similar groups of sense impressions or by linking the evidence of the different senses?” “That seems far from certain, and not even particularly con- vincing. I have recently been reading Malebranche, and I was struck by a reference to this very problem. Malebranche examines three possible ways in which ideas can originate. One you have just mentioned yourself: as they impinge on our senses, objects produce concepts directly in our mind. Now this is a possibility Malebranche rejects, on the grounds that sense impressions differ qualitatively both from things and also from ideas. The second possibility is that the human mind has ideas from the outset, or at least has the power to form these ideas by itself. In that case, sense impressions merely remind us of ideas already present or else impel the mind to form them. There is a third possibility— and this is the one that Malebranche plumps for: that the human mind participates in divine reason. It is linked to God, and it is from God that it derives its conceptual power, the images or ideas with which it can arrange the wealth of sense impressions and articulate them conceptually.” “You philosophers are always quick to introduce theology,” Kurt objected. “As soon as things get difficult, you produce the great unknown to get you out of your rut. I, for one, refuse to be put off in this way. Since you yourself have posed the question, just tell me how precisely the human mind gets hold of ideas, in this world, not in the next. For the mind and ideas both exist in this world, do they not? If you refuse to admit that ideas origi- nate in experience, then it is up to you to explain how else they come to be part of the human mind. Are you really suggesting that ideas, or at least the ability to form ideas—through which even a child experiences the world—are inborn? If you do, you must believe that our ideas spring from the experiences of earlier generations. Well, as far as I am concerned, it matters little whether present experiences or those of past generations are responsible.” “No,” Robert replied, “that was not at all what I meant. On6 PHYSICS AND BEYOND the one hand, it is extremely doubtful whether learning, which is the result of experience, can be handed down by hereditary processes. On the other hand, Malebranche’s view can be ex- pressed without theological overtones, and so be brought into closer line with modern science. I shall try to do so. Malebranche might easily have said that the same tendencies that provide for visible order in the world, for the existence of chemical elements and their properties, for the formation of crystals, for the crea- tion of life and everything else, may also have been at work in the creation of man’s mind. It is these tendencies which cause ideas to correspond to things and which ensure the articulation of concepts. They are responsible for all those real structures that only become split into an objective factor—the thing—and a subjective factor—the idea—when we contemplate them from our human standpoint, when we fix them in our thoughts. Malebranche'’s thesis has this in common with your conviction that all ideas are based on experience: it grants that the ability to form ideas may well have originated in the course of evolu- tion, in the wake of contacts between living organisms and the external world. However, Malebranche went on to stress that these links cannot be explained away by a chain of causally determined, individual processes. In other words, he argues that here—as in the genesis of crystals or living creatures—we come up against higher morphological structures that elude all at- tempts to contain them in the conceptual couple: cause and effect. The question whether experience is antecedent to ideas or vice versa is probably no more relevant than the old question about the hen and the egg. “For the rest, I have no wish to interfere in your conversation. I only wanted to warn you against talking too glibly about experience when dealing with atoms, for it might well turn out that your atoms—which, after all, elude direct observation—are not just things but parts of more fundamental structures which cannot be meaningfully divided into idea and object. I agree, of course, that the hooks and eyes in your textbook must not be taken too literally, or for that matter any of those pictures of atoms that abound in popular writings. Such pictures, which claim to facilitate our understanding, only serve to obscure the real problem, But I think that when you speak about ‘atomicFIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE ATOMIC CONCEPT 7 forms,’ as you did just now, you have to be extremely careful. Only if you give the word ‘form’ a very wide connotation, use it in more than a purely spatial sense, only if you employ it as loosely as, for instance, I myself have just spoken of ‘structure,’ can I follow you at least part of the way.” I was suddenly reminded of a fascinating book I had read with keen interest a year earlier, though parts of it had completely eluded me. That book was Plato's Timaeus. It, too, contains a philosophical discussion of the smallest particles of matter. Rob- ert's words had just given me my first, vague inkling that it was indeed possible to come to grips with these strange mental con- structs. Not that these constructs, which I had previously found quite absurd, had suddenly become plausible—it was just that I had glimpsed a path that might lead to them. To explain why I was so strongly reminded of the Timaeus at just that moment, I must briefly recall the circumstances under which I had read the book, In the spring of 1919, Munich was in a state of utter confusion. On the streets people were shooting at one another, and no one could tell precisely who the contestants were. Political power fluctuated between persons and institutions few of us could have named. Pillage and robbery (I was burgled myself) caused the term “Soviet Republic” to become a synonym of lawlessness, and when, at Jong last, a new Bavarian govern- ment was formed outside Munich, and sent its troops into the city, we were all of us hoping for a speedy return to more orderly conditions. The father of the boy whom I had been coaching took command of a company of volunteers, anxious to play their part in the recapture of the city. He asked his son’s friends, all of whom were familiar with the locality, to act as guides to the advancing troops. And so we were assigned to Cavalry Rifle Command No. 11, with headquarters in the Theological Train- ing College opposite the university. Here I did my military service, or rather here all of us led a fairly wild and adventurous life. There were no lessons, as so often before, and many of us were anxious to use this freedom to take a fresh look at the world. Most of the boys with whom I later went hiking around Lake Starnberg were somehow or other engaged in the fighting. Our adventures were over after a few weeks; then the shooting died down and military service became increasingly monotonous.8 PHYSICS AND BEYOND Quite often it happened that, after spending the whole night on guard in the telephone exchange, I was free for a day, and in order to catch up with my neglected school work I would retire to the roof of the Training College with a Greek school edition of Plato's Dialogues. There, lying in the wide gutter, and warmed by the rays of the early morning sun, I could pursue my studies in peace, and from time to time watch the quickening life in the Ludwigstrasse below. One such morning, when the light of the sun was already flooding across the university buildings and the fountain, I came to the Timaeus, or rather to those passages in which Plato dis- cusses the smallest particles of matter. Perhaps that section cap- tured my imagination only because it was so hard to translate into German, or because it dealt with mathematical matters, which had always interested me. In any case, I worked my way laboriously through the text, even though what I read seemed completely nonsensical. The smallest particles of matter were said to be right-angled triangles which, after combining in pairs into isosceles triangles or squares, joined together into the regu- lar bodies of solid geometry: cubes, tetrahedrons, octahedrons and icosahedrons. These four bodies were said to be the building blocks of the four elements, earth, fire, air and water. I could not make out whether these regular bodies were associated with the elements merely as symbols—for instance, the cube with the ele- ment earth so as to represent the solidity and balance of that element—or whether the smallest parts of the earth were actually supposed to be cube-shaped. In either case, the whole thing seemed to be wild speculation, pardonable perhaps on the ground that the Greeks lacked the necessary empirical knowl- edge. Nevertheless, it saddened me to find a philosopher of Plato’s critical acumen succumbing to such fancies, I looked for a principle that might help me to find some justification for Plato's speculation, but, try though I might, I could discover none. Even so, I was enthralled by the idea that the smallest particles of matter must reduce to some mathematical form. After all, any attempt to unravel the dense skein of natural phenomena is dependent upon the discovery of mathematical forms, but why Plato should have chosen the regular bodies of solid geometry, of all things, remained a complete mystery to me. They seemed toFIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE ATOMIC CONCEPT 9 have no explanatory value at all. If I nevertheless continued reading the Dialogues, it was simply to brush up on my Greek. Yet I remained perturbed. The most important result of it all, perhaps, was the conviction that, in order to interpret the material world we need to know something about its smallest parts. Moreover, I knew from textbooks and popular writing that modern science was also inquiring into atoms. Perhaps, later in my studies, I myself might enter this strange world. But the time ‘was not yet. Meanwhile, my uneasiness continued, though perhaps it was only part of the general disquiet that had seized all German youth. I kept wondering why a great philosopher like Plato should have thought he could recognize order in natural phe- nomena when we ourselves could not. What precisely was the meaning of that term? Are order and our understanding of it purely time-bound? We had all of us grown up in a world that had seemed well ordered enough, and our parents had taught us the bourgeois virtues underpinning that order. The Greeks and the Romans had known that, at times, it may become necessary to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of maintaining an orderly way of life, and the death of many of our own friends and relatives had shown us that such was the way of the world even now. That was only to be expected. But there were many who now claimed that the war had been a crime, a crime, moreover, committed by the very men who had been responsible for maintaining the old European order, who had tried to defend it come what may. The old structure of Europe had been shattered by our defeat. That, too, was nothing special. Wherever there are wars there must also be losers. But did that mean that all the old structures had to be discarded? Was it not far better to build a new and more solid order on the old? Or were those right who, in the streets of Munich, had sacrificed their lives to prevent a restoration of the old ways and who proclaimed a new order, not just for a single nation, but for all mankind, even though the majority of man- kind might have no wish to build such an order? Our heads were full of such questions, and our elders were unable to pro- vide the answers. After my reading of the Timaeus and before our walk on the hills around Lake Starnberg I had another experience which was10 PHYSICS AND BEYOND to affect my later thoughts profoundly, and which I shall report before returning to our discussion of the atomic problem, A few months after they had captured Munich, the government troops pulled out again, and we returned to school. One afternoon, I was buttonholed by an unknown boy on Leopoldstrasse: “Have you heard about the Youth Assembly in Prunn Castle next week?” he asked. “All of us intend to be there, and we want you to come as well. The more the merrier. We want to find out for ourselves what sort of future we should build!” His voice had the kind of edge I had not heard before. And so I decided to go to Prunn Castle, and asked Kurt to join me. It took the train, which was running somewhat sporadically, several hours to bring us to the Lower Altmiihl Valley. In early geological times it must have been the floor of the Danube; here the river Altmith] has twisted and bored its way through the Jura Mountains, and the picturesque valley is crowned with old castles reminiscent of the Rhenish scene. We had to cover the last few miles to the castle on foot, and could see large crowds making for the heights from all sides. Prunn Castle stands sheer on a rock at the edge of the valley. The courtyard, with its central well, was teeming with people. Most of them were schoolboys, but there was a sprinkling of older boys who had suffered all the horrors of war at the front and had returned to a completely changed world. There were many speeches that day, full of the kind of pathos that would ring quite false today. We argued passionately about whether the fate of our own nation mattered more than that of all mankind; whether the death of those who had fallen for their country had become meaningless through defeat; whether youth had the right to fashion life according to its own values; whether inner truth was more important than all the old forms that had been shaping human life for centuries. I myself was much too unsure to join in the debates, but I listened and once again thought a great deal about the meaning f “order.” From the remarks of the speakers it was clear that different orders, however sincerely upheld, could clash, and that the result was the very opposite of order. This, I felt, was only possible because all these types of order were partial, mere frag- ments that had split off from the central order; they might notFIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE ATOMIC CONCEPT ql have lost their creative force, but they were no longer directed toward a unifying center. Its absence was brought home to me with increasingly painful intensity the longer I listened. I was suffering almost physically, but I was quite unable to discover a way toward the center through the thicket of conflicting opin- ions. Thus the hours ticked by, while more speeches were de- livered and more disputes were born. The shadows in the courtyard grew longer, and finally the hot day gave way to slate- gray dusk and a moonlit night. The talk was still going on when, quite suddenly, a young violinist appeared on a balcony above the courtyard, There was a hush as, high above us, he struck up the first great D minor chords of Bach's Chaconne. All at once, and with utter certainty, I had found my link with the center. The moonlit Altmihl Valley below would have been reason enough for a romantic transfiguration; but that was not it. The clear phrases of the Chaconne touched me like a cool wind, breaking through the mist and revealing the towering structures beyond. There had always been a path to the central order in the language of music, in philosophy and in religion, today no less than in Plato’s day and in Bach’s. That I now knew from my own experience. We spent the rest of the night around campfires and in our tents on a meadow above the castle, giving full rein to our romantic and poetic sentiments. The young musician, himself a student, sat near our group and played minuets by Mozart and Beethoven interspersed with old folk songs; I tried to accompany him on my guitar. Otherwise, he proved a very gay young fellow and was reluctant to discuss his solemn rendering of the Cha- conne. When pressed, he came back at us with “Do you know the key of the trumpets of Jericho?” “No.” “D minor [d-moll] also, of course.” “Why?” “Because they d-moll-ished the walls!” He escaped our wrath only by taking to his heels. That night had slipped into the twilight of memories by the time I went hiking across the hills round Lake Starnberg, and talked about atoms. Robert’s references to Malebranche had convinced me that our experience of atoms can only be indirect: atoms are not things. This was probably what Plato had tried to say in his Timaeus, and, seen in this light, his speculations about regular bodies were beginning to make more sense to me. When12 PHYSICS AND BEYOND modern scientists speak about the form of atoms, they must be using the word “form” in its widest sense, i.e, they must be referring to the atom’s structure in time and space, to the symmetrical properties of its forces, to its ability to form com- pounds with other atoms. In all probability, such structures will forever elude our powers of graphic description, if only because they are not an obvious part of the objective world of things. But perhaps they are nonetheless open to mathematical treatment. At once I wanted to learn more about the philosophical aspects of the atomic problem, and to that end I mentioned Plato's Timaeus to Robert. I asked him if he was in general agreement with Plato's belief that all material things consist of small units, that there must be ultimate particles into which all matter can be divided. I gained the impression that he took a rather skepti- cal view of the whole question. He confirmed this when he said: “Your whole manner of posing the problem, of going so far beyond the world of direct experience, is quite foreign to me. I feel much closer to the world of human beings, to lakes and forests, than I do to atoms. | know that we can ask what happens if we keep dividing and subdivid- ing matter, just as we can ask whether the distant stars and their planets are inhabited by living beings. But I myself can't say I have much interest in such questions, Perhaps I don’t even want to know the answers. I believe we have far more important tasks than that.” “I don’t wish to argue with you about the relative importance of our respective tasks,” I told him. “I myself have always been fascinated by science, and I know that many serious people are anxious to learn more about nature and her laws. Who knows but that their work may not prove of the utmost importance for the whole of mankind? But that is not what matters to me at the moment. What worries me is this: it looks very much as if—and Kurt has been saying just that—modern developments in science and technology have brought us very close to the point where we can see individual atoms, or at least their effects, where we can start to experiment with them, Admittedly, we ourselves still know very little about the subject, simply because our studies have not taken us far enough. But, if my prognosis is correct, what would you, as a disciple of Malebranche, say about it?” “I should expect that atoms would, in any case, behave quiteFIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE ATOMIC CONCEPT 13 differently from the objects of everyday experience. I could imagine that attempts to divide matter even further might lead us to fluctuations and discontinuities from which it would be quite possible to conclude that matter has a grainy structure, But I also believe that the new structures will elude all our attempts to construct tangible images, that they will prove to be abstract expressions of natural laws rather than things.” “But what if we could see them?” “We shall never be able to see atoms themselves, only their effects.” “That’s a poor excuse of an answer. For the same remark applies to things in general. In the case of a cat, too, all you can see is the reflection of light rays, i.e., the effects of the cat, and not the cat itself. And when you stroke its fur, the situation is much the same!” “I'm afraid I can’t agree with you. I can see a cat directly, for when I look at it, I can—indeed, I must—transform my sense impressions into a coherent idea. In the case of the cat we come face to face with two aspects: an objective and a subjective one— the cat as a thing and as a notion. But atoms are quite a different matter. Here notion and thing can no longer be separated, simply because the atom is neither the one nor the other.” Kurt joined in the discussion once again. “The two of you are much too learned for me; you make free with philosophical speculations, when, in fact, you should be consulting experience. Perhaps our studies may one day introduce us to experiments about or with atoms, and then we shall know what atoms really are. We shall probably discover that they are just as real as all other things which lend themselves to experiment. For if it is true that all material things consist of atoms, then it follows that atoms must be just as real as material things.” “No,” replied Robert, “I think your conclusion is highly questionable. You might just as well say that, because all living beings are made up of atoms, atoms are fully alive. Clearly, that is nonsense. Only the combination of a great many atoms into larger structures endows these structures with their characteristic qualities or properties.” “And so you think that atoms don’t actually exist, that they are not real?” “You exaggerate again. Perhaps what we are arguing about is14 PHYSICS AND BEYOND not so much our knowledge of atoms as the meaning of the words ‘actually’ or ‘real.’ You have mentioned the Timaeus and told us that Plato identifies the smallest particles of matter with mathe- matical forms, with regular bodies. Even if he was wrong in fact—and Plato had no experience with atoms—he could have been right in principle. Would you call such mathematical forms ‘actual’ or ‘real’? If they express natural laws, that is the central order inherent in material processes, then you must also call them ‘actual,’ for they act, they produce tangible effects, but you cannot call them ‘real,’ because they cannot be described as res, as things. In short, we do not know what words we should use, and this is bound to happen once we leave the realm of direct experience, the realm in which our language was formed in pre- historic times.” Kurt remained unconvinced. “I should like to leave even this decision to experiment. I cannot believe that the human imagi- nation can tell us anything about the smallest particles of matter before crucial experiments have familiarized us with them. Only careful investigations, conducted without any preconceptions, can help us here. That is precisely why I am so skeptical about philosophical generalizations on so difficult a subject. They merely cement mental prejudices and hinder rather than foster true understanding. I sincerely hope that scientists will come to grips with atoms long before you philosophers have.” By now, the rest of the party had lost patience with us. “For God’s sake, can’t you ever stop your bickering?” one of them pleaded. “If you want to bone up for your examinations, please do so at home. How about a song?” We began to sing, and the bright sound of young voices, the colors of the blossoming meadows, were suddenly much more real than all our thoughts about atoms, and dispelled the fancies to which we had sur- rendered.2 The Decision to Study Physics (1920) From school I did not go straight on to the university; there was a sharp break in my life. After my matriculation, I went on a walking tour through Franconia with the same group of friends, and then I fell seriously ill and had to stay in bed for many weeks. During my long recuperation, too, I was locked away with my books. In these critical months I came across a work that I found extremely fascinating, though I was unable to understand it fully. The author was the famous mathematician, Hermann Weyl, and the book was entitled Space, Time and Matter. It was meant to provide a mathematical account of Einstein’s relativity theory. The difficult mathematical arguments and the abstract thought underlying that theory both excited and disturbed me, and, in addition, confirmed me in my earlier decision to study mathematics at the University of Munich, During the first days of my studies, however, a strange and, to me, most surprising event took place, which I should like to report in brief. My father, who taught Middle and Modern Greek at the University of Munich, had arranged an interview with Ferdinand von Lindemann, the professor of mathematics, famous for his solution of the ancient problem of squaring the circle. I intended to ask permission to attend his seminars, for which I imagined my spare-time studies of mathematics had fully prepared me; but when I called on the great man, in his gloomy first-floor office furnished in rather formal, old-fashioned style, I felt an almost immediate sense of oppression, Before I could utter a16 PHYSICS AND BEYOND word of greeting to the professor, who rose from his chair very slowly, I noticed a little black dog cowering on the desk, and was forcefully reminded of the poodle in Faust’s study. The little beast looked at me with undisguised animosity; I was an unwel- come intruder about to disturb his master’s peace of mind. I was so taken aback that I began to stammer, and even as I spoke it dawned on me that my request was excessively immodest. Linde- mann, a tired-looking old gentleman with a white beard, ob- viously felt the same way about it, and his slight irritation may have been the reason why the small dog now set up a horrible barking. His master tried to calm him down, but the little beast only grew more hysterical, so that we could barely hear each other speak. Lindemann asked me what books I had recently been reading, and I mentioned Weyl’s Space, Time and Matter. As the tiny monster kept up his yapping, Lindemann closed the conversation with “In that case you are completely lost to mathe- matics,” And that was that. Clearly mathematics was not for me. A somewhat wearing consultation with my father ended with the advice that I ought to try my hand at theoretical physics. Accordingly, he made an appointment with his old friend Arnold Sommerfeld, then head of the Faculty of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich and generally considered one of the most brilliant teachers there. Sommerfeld received me in a bright study with windows over- looking a courtyard where I could see a crowd of students on benches beneath a large acacia. The small squat man with his martial dark mustache looked rather austere to me. But his very first sentences revealed his benevolence, his genuine concern for young people, and in particular for the boy who had come to ask his guidance and advice. Once again the conversation turned to the mathematical studies I had pursued as a hobby while still at school, and to Weyl’s Space, Time and Matter. Sommerfeld's reaction was completely different from Lindemann’s. “You are much too demanding,” he said. “You can’t possibly start with the most difficult part and hope that the rest will automatically fall into your lap. I gather that you are fascinated by relativity theory and atomic problems. But remember that this is not the only field in which modern physics challenges basic philosophical attitudes, in which extremely exciting ideas areTHE DECISION TO STUDY PHYSICS 17 being forged. To reach them is much more difficult than you seem to imagine. You must start with a modest but painstaking study of traditional physics. And if you want to study science at all, you must first make up your mind whether you want to concentrate on experimental or theoretical research. From what you have told me, I take it that you are much keener on theory. But didn’t you do experiments and dabble with instruments at school?” I said that I used to like building small engines, motors and induction coils. But, all in all, I had never been really at home in the world of instruments, and the care needed in making rela- tively unimportant measurements had struck me as being sheer drudgery. “Still, even if you study theory, you will have to pay particular attention to what may appear trivial little tasks, Even those who deal with the larger issues, issues with profound philosophical implications—for instance, with Einstein's relativity theory or with Planck’s quantum theory—have to tackle a great many petty problems. Only by solving these can they hope to get an over-all picture of the new realms they have opened up.” “Even so, I am much more interested in the underlying philo- sophical ideas than in the rest,” I said rather bashfully. But Sommerfeld would have none of this. “You must remem- ber what Schiller said about Kant and his interpreters: ‘When kings go a-building, wagoners have more work.’ At first, none of us are anything but wagoners. But you will see that you, too, will get pleasure from performing minor tasks carefully and con- scientiously and, let's hope, from achieving decent results.” Sommerfeld then gave me a few more hints about my pre- liminary studies, and said that he might well come up with a little problem connected with recent developments in atomic theory on which I could try my mettle. And it was decided that I would join his classes for the next few years. This, my first conversation with a scholar who really knew his way about in modern physics, who had personally made impor- tant discoveries in a field impinging on both relativity and quantum theory, had a lasting effect upon me. Though his call for care in small details struck me as eminently reasonable—I had heard it often enough from my own father—I felt dejected at18 PHYSICS AND BEYOND the thought that I was still such a long way from the field that really interested me. No wonder that this interview became the subject of many discussions with my friends. I remember one of these particularly well: it bore on modern physics and the cul- ture of our time. That autumn, I saw a great deal of the boy who had played Bach’s Chaconne so magnificently in Prunn Castle. We would meet in the house of our mutual friend, Walter, himself a fine cellist, and practice for a private recital of Schubert's B Major Trio, Walter's father had died at an early age, and his mother had been left to care for her two sons in a large and very elegantly furnished house in Elisabeth Strasse, just a few min- utes’ walk from my parents’ house in Hohenzollern Strasse. The magnificent Bechstein grand in the living room was an added reason for our frequent visits. After we had finished playing, we would often talk deep into the night, and it was on one such occasion that the conversation came round to my proposed studies. Walter’s mother wondered why I had not decided to make music my career. “From the way you play and speak about music, I get the impression that you are much more at home with art than with science and technology, that you prefer the muses to scientific instruments, formulae and machinery. If I am right, why ever have you chosen natural science? After all, the future of the world will be decided by you young people. If youth chooses beauty, then there will be more beauty; if it chooses utility, then there will be more useful things. The decision of each individual is of importance not only to himself but to the whole of man- kind.” “I can’t really believe that we are faced with that sort of choice,” I said rather defensively. “Quite apart from the fact that I probably wouldn’t make a very good musician, the question remains in which field one can contribute most. Now I have the clear impression that in recent years music has lost much of its earlier force. In the seventeenth century music was still deeply steeped in the religious way of life; in the eighteenth century came the conquest of the world of individual emotions; in the nineteenth century romantic music plumbed the innermost depths of the human soul. But in the last few years music seemsTHE DECISION TO STUDY PHYSICS 19 to have quite deliberately entered a strange, disturbed and rather feeble stage of experimentation, in which theoretical notions take precedence over the desire for progress along estab- lished paths. In science, and particularly in physics, things are quite different. Here the pursuit of clear objectives along fixed paths—the same paths that led to the understanding of certain electromagnetic phenomena twenty years ago—has quite auto- matically thrown up problems that challenge the whole philo- sophical basis of science, the structure of space and time, and even the validity of causal laws. Here we are on terra incognita, and it will probably take several generations of physicists to dis- cover the final answers. And I frankly confess that I am highly tempted to play some part in all this.” My friend Rolf, the violinist, demurred. “As far as I can see, your remarks about modern physics apply equally well to mod- ern music. Here, too, the path seems to be clearly mapped. The old tonal barriers are collapsing and we find ourselves on promis- ing virgin soil, with almost complete freedom to choose what sounds and rhythms we like. Hence the musician has every chance of discovering as many riches as the scientist.” ‘Walter now raised several objections of his own. “I don’t really know whether ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘promising virgin soil’ are necessarily the same thing. At first sight it admittedly looks as if greater freedom must necessarily mean enrichment, wider possibilities; but this I know to be untrue in art, with which Iam more familiar than with science. I would think that progress in art takes place in the following way: First a slow historical pro- cess transforms the life of men in spite of themselves, and thereby throws up fresh ideas. A few talented artists then try to give these ideas a visible or audible form by wresting new possibilities of expression from the material with which they work—from colors or musical instruments. This interplay or, if you like, this struggle between the expressive content and the limitations of the expressive medium is, I think, a sine qua non of the emergence of real art. If the limitations of the expressive medium were taken away-—if in music, for instance, we could produce any sounds we liked—then the struggle would be over, and the artist’s effort would reach into a void. For that reason I am skeptical about too much freedom.20 PHYSICS AND BEYOND “In science,” Walter continued, “a continuous flow of new experiments is made possible by new techniques; there are new experiences and as a result new contents may be produced. Here the means of expression are the concepts by which the new ideas are grasped and made explicit. For instance, I have read that Einstein's relativity theory, which interests you so much, was born from the failure of certain experiments designed to demon- strate the motion of the earth through space by means of the interference of light rays. When this demonstration misfired, it became clear that the new results, or, what amounts to the same thing, the new ideas, called for an extension of the means of expression, i.e., of the conceptual system proper to physics. Quite likely, no one anticipated that this would demand radical changes in such fundamental concepts as space and time. It was Einstein's great achievement to appreciate before anyone else that the ideas of space and time were not only susceptible to change but, in fact, had to be changed. “What you have said about recent developments in physics could reasonably be compared with developments in music in the middle of the eighteenth century. At that time, a gradual his- torical process had led to a growing awareness of the emotional world of the individual—as all of us know from Rousseau and later from Goethe’s Werther—and it was then that the great classicists—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert—succeeded in extending the means of expression and so discovered the musical language needed for depicting this emotional world, In modern music, on the other hand, the new contents appear to be highly obscure and implausible, and the plethora of possible expressions fills me with deep forebodings. The path of modern music seems to be determined by a purely negative postulate: the old tonality has to be discarded because we believe that its powers have been exhausted, and not because there are new and more forceful ideas which it is incapable of expressing. Musicians are entirely in the dark about the next step; at best they grope their way forward. In modern science the questions are clearly posed, and the task is to find the right answers. In modern art, however, even the questions are uncertain. But perhaps you had best tell us a bit more about the new fields you intend to explore in the world of physics.”THE DECISION TO STUDY PHYSICS 21 I tried to convey what little bits of knowledge I had gleaned during my illness, mainly from popular books on atomic physics. “In relativity theory,” I told Walter, “the experiments you have mentioned, together with other experiments, caused Ein- stein to discard the prevailing concept of simultaneity. That in itself was exciting enough. Every one of us thinks that he knows precisely what the word ‘simultaneous’ means, even if it refers to events that take place at great distances. But we are mis- taken. For if we ask how one determines whether two such events are, in fact, simultaneous and then evaluates the various means of verification by their results, nature herself informs us that the answers are not at all clear-cut but depend on the ob- server's state of motion. Space and time are therefore not inde- pendent of each other, as we previously believed. Einstein was able to express the ‘new’ structure of space and time by means of a simple and coherent mathematical formula. While I was ill, I tried to probe into this mathematical world, which, as I have since learned from Sommerfeld, has already been opened up fairly extensively and has therefore ceased to be unexplored territory. “The most interesting problems now lie in a different field, in atomic physics. Here we come face to face with the fundamental question why the material world manifests ever-recurring forms and qualities—why, for example, water with all its characteristic properties is invariably reproduced during the melting of ice, the condensation of steam or the combustion of hydrogen. This has been taken for granted in physics, but has never been fully ex- plained. Let us suppose that material bodies—in our case, water —are composed of atoms. Chemistry has long made successful use of this idea. Now, the Newtonian laws we were taught at school cannot tell us why the motions of the particles involved should be as stable as they, in fact, are. Only quite different natural laws can help us to explain why atoms should invariably rearrange themselves and move in such a way as to produce the same sub- stances with the same stable properties. We first caught a glimpse of these laws twenty years ago, in Planck’s quantum theory. Since then, the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, has combined Planck’s theory with Lord Rutherford's atomic model. In so doing, he was the first to throw light on the curious stability of atoms which I22 PHYSICS AND BEYOND have just mentioned. But Sommerfeld believes that in this sphere we are still a long way from a clear understanding of the ways of mature. Here we have a vast unexplored field, in which new relationships may be discovered for decades to come. By the ap- propriate reformulation of natural laws and with correct new concepts we might, for instance, be able to reduce the whole of chemistry to atomic physics. In short, I firmly believe that in atomic physics we are on the track of far more important rela- tions, far more important structures, than in music. But I freely admit that 150 years ago things were the other way round.” “In other words,” Walter asked, “you believe that anyone con- cerned with cultural progress must necessarily make use of the historical possibilities of the age in which he lives? That, if Mozart had been born in our day, he, too, would be writing atonal and experimental music?” “Yes, I suspect just that. If Einstein had lived in the twelfth century, he would not have been able to make important scien- tific discoveries.” “Perhaps it is wrong to keep bringing up such great men as Mozart and Einstein,” Walter's mother said. “Few individuals get the chance to play such decisive roles. Most of us must con- tent ourselves with working quietly in a small circle, and ought to ask simply whether playing Schubert's B Major Trio is not more satisfactory than building instruments or writing mathe- matical formulae.” I agreed that I myself had quite a few qualms and mentioned Sommerfeld’s quotation from Schiller: ‘“When kings go a-build- ing, wagoners have more work.” “We all feel the same way about it,” Rolf declared. “Those of us who want to become musicians have to take infinite pains to master their instruments, and even then can only hope to play pieces that hundreds of better musicians have played much more proficiently. And you yourself will have to spend long hours with instruments that others have built much more competently, or retrace the mathematical thoughts of the masters. True, when all this has been done, the musical wagoners among us are left with no small sense of achievement: constant intercourse with glorious music and the occasional delight of a particularly successful interpretation, Likewise, you scientists will occasionally manageTHE DECISION TO STUDY PHYSICS 23 to interpret a relationship just that little bit better than anyone before you, or determine a particular process more accurately than your predecessors. But none of us ought to count on the fact that he will be doing trail-blazing work, that he will make deci- sive discoveries. Not even when he works in a field where a great deal of territory has still to be opened up.” Walter's mother, who had been listening attentively, now said something, more to herself than to us, as if she were trying to formulate her thoughts as she spoke: “The parable of the kings and the wagoners may have quite a different import. Of course, superficially it looks as if the glory is entirely the kings’, as if the wagoners’ work were purely sub- sidiary and unimportant. But perhaps the very opposite is true. Perhaps the kings’ glory rests on the work of the wagoners, on the fact that the wagoners have put in many years of laborious effort, reaping joy and success. Perhaps men like Bach or Mozart are kings of music only because, for two long centuries, they have offered so many lesser musicians the chance of reinterpreting their thoughts with love and conscientious attention to detail. And even the audience participates in this careful work as it hears the message of the great musicians. “I£ you look at historical developments—in the arts no less than in the sciences—you will find that every discipline has long periods of quiescence or of slow growth. Even during these periods, however, the important thing is careful work, attention to detail. Everything that is not done with utter devotion falls into oblivion and, in fact, does not deserve to be remembered. And then, quite suddenly, this slow process, in which general historical developments introduce changes in the contents of a particular discipline, opens up new possibilities, quite unex- pected contents. Talented men feel an almost magical attraction for the process of growth they can sense at work here, and so it happens that, within a few decades, a relatively small region of the world will produce major works of art or scientific discoveries of the greatest importance. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, classical music poured forth from Vienna; in the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries painting had its heyday in the Netherlands. True, great men are needed to express the new spiritual contents, to create the forms in which further develop-24 PHYSICS AND BEYOND ments can be molded, but they do not actually produce these new contents. “Of course, it is quite possible that we are on the threshold of an exceptionally fruitful scientific epoch, in which case it would be wrong to dissuade any young man from participating in it. It seems unlikely that important developments will take place in more than one branch of art or science at one time; we ought to be grateful enough if it happens in any one area, if we can share in its glory either as bystanders or as active participants. It would be foolish to expect more. That is precisely why I find popular attacks on modern art—be it painting or music—so unjust. Once music and the plastic arts had solved the great problems posed to them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there just had to be a more restful period, in which much of the old could be preserved and new things were tested by trial and error. To compare modern compositions with the finest achievements of the great epoch of classical music seems utterly unfair. Perhaps we ought to finish the evening with the slow movement of Schubert’s B Major Trio. Let’s see how well you can play it.” We did as we were asked, and from the way in which Rolf played the somewhat melancholic C major figures in the second part of the movement, I could sense how sad he was at the thought that the great epoch of European music might be gone forever. A few days later, when I walked into the hall where Sommer- feld usually gave his lectures, I spotted a dark-haired student with a somewhat secretive face in the third row. Sommerfeld had introduced us during my first visit and had then told me that he considered this boy to be one of his most talented students, one from whom I could learn a great deal. His name was Wolfgang Pauli, and for the rest of his life he was to be a good friend, though often a very severe critic. I sat down beside him and asked him if, after the lecture, I might consult him about my preparatory studies. Sommerfeld now entered the hall, and as soon as he started to address us Wolfgang whispered in my ear: “Doesn't he look the typical old Hussar officer?” After the lec- ture, we went back to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, where I asked Wolfgang two questions. I wanted to know how much experimental work had to be done by someone interested chieflyTHE DECISION TO STUDY PHYSICS 25 in theory, and what he thought of the respective importance of relativity and atomic theory. “I know,” Wolfgang told me in reply to my first question, “that Sommerfeld lays great stress on experimental studies, but I myself am not cut out for them; I hate the whole business of handling instruments. I quite agree that physics is based on experimental results, but once these results have been obtained, physics, at least modern physics, becomes much too difficult a subject for most experimental physicists. This is probably so because the sophisticated instruments of modern physics take us into realms of nature that cannot be adequately described with everyday concepts. We are forced to employ an abstract kind of mathematical language and one that presupposes a considerable amount of training in modern mathematics. It is a sad fact but true that we all have to specialize. I find abstract mathematical language quite easy, and hope to put it to good use in my work. Needless to say, I realize that some knowledge of the experimental side is absolutely essential. The pure mathematician, however good, understands nothing at all about physics.” I then repeated my conversation with old Lindemann, and told Wolfgang about his black lap dog and his reaction to my reading Weyl’s Space, Time and Matter. My report obviously caused Wolfgang the greatest amusement. “That's just what I would have expected,” he said. “Weyl really does know a lot about relativity theory, and for Linde- mann such knowledge is enough to disqualify anyone from bearing the title of serious mathematician.” As to the respective importance of relativity and atomic theory, Wolfgang had this to say: “The so-called special theory of relativity is now a closed chapter; you simply have to learn it and use it like any other theory in physics. Nor is it of particular interest to anyone anxious to make new discoveries. However, the general theory of relativity, or, what comes to much the same thing, Einstein’s theory of gravitation, is still wide-open, But it is rather unsatisfying in that, for each experiment, it will give you a hundred pages of theory with the most complicated mathematical derivations, No one can really say whether the whole thing is correct. Nevertheless it opens up new possibilities of thought, and for that reason must be taken seriously. I have26 PHYSICS AND BEYOND recently written a fairly lengthy article on the general theory of relativity; perhaps that is one of the reasons why I find atomic theory so much more interesting. “In atomic physics we still have a wealth of uninterpreted experimental results: nature’s evidence in one place seems to contradict that in another, and so far it has not been possible to draw an even halfway coherent picture of the relationship in- volved. True, Niels Bohr has succeeded in associating the strange stability of atoms with Planck’s quantum hypothesis— which has not yet been properly interpreted either—and more recently Bohr is said to have given a qualitative explanation of the periodic system of the elements and of their chemical prop- erties. But I can’t for the life of me see how he could have done so, seeing that he, too, is unable to get rid of the contradictions I have mentioned. In other words, everyone is still groping about in a thick mist, and it will probably be quite a few years before it lifts. Sommerfeld hopes that experiments will help us to find some of the new laws. He believes in numerical links, almost in a kind of number mysticism of the kind the Pythagoreans applied to the harmony of vibrating strings. That’s why many of us have called this side of his science ‘atomysticism,’ though, as far as I can tell, no one has been able to suggest anything better. Perhaps it’s much easier to find one’s way if one isn’t too familiar with the magnificent unity of classical physics. You have a decided advan- tage there,” Wolfgang added with a malicious grin, “but then lack of knowledge is no guarantee of success.” Despite this little broadside, Wolfgang had confirmed every- thing I myself had been thinking before I decided to make physics my career. I was very glad not to have tried my hand at pure mathematics, and I looked back on Lindemann’s little dog as “part of that power which still produceth good, whilst ever scheming ill.”3 “Understanding” in Modern Physics (1920-922) My first two years at Munich University were spent in two quite different worlds: among my friends of the Youth Movement and in the abstract realm of theoretical physics. Both worlds were so filled with intense activity that I was often in a state of great agitation, the more so as I found it rather difficult to shuttle between the two. In Sommerfeld’s seminar, talks with Wolfgang Pauli constituted the most important part of my studies. But Wolfgang's way of life was almost diametrically opposed to my own. While I loved the daylight and spent as much of my free time as I could mountain-walking, swimming or cooking simple meals on the shore of one of the Bavarian lakes, Wolfgang was a typical night bird. He preferred the town, liked to spend his evenings in some old bar or café, and would then work on his physics through much of the night with great concentration and success. Quite naturally, and to Sommerfeld's dismay, he would rarely attend morning lectures; it was not until noon that he generally turned up. This difference in our styles of living was the subject of quite a bit of ribbing, but did not otherwise mar our friendship—our common interest in physics saw to that. When I think back on the summer of 1921, and try to compress my many memories into a single picture, my mind’s eye conjures up a camp that stood on the edge of a forest. Below, still in the gray light of dawn, lay the lake in which we had swum the day before, and across it, in the distance, the broad crest of the Benedictine Ridge. My comrades would still be asleep when I left28 PHYSICS AND BEYOND my tent and took the footpath for an hour's walk to the nearest railway station. From there, the early-morning train would carry me to Munich in time to attend Sommerfeld’s g a.m. lecture. The footpath led down to the lake through marshy ground, then on to a moraine with a view over the Alpine chain, from the Benedic- tine Ridge as far as the Zugspitze. On the blossoming meadows, I could see the first mowing machines, and I was sorry that I was no longer a farm worker on the Grossthalerhof in Miesbach. Three years earlier, using a pair of oxen, I would have done my best to cut the meadow so straight that no strip of grass, or, as the farmer called it, no “pig,” was left behind. And so, my thoughts filled with a colorful medley of everyday impressions from my farming days, with the beauty of the landscape, and with Som- merfeld’s coming lecture, I was convinced I was the happiest mortal on earth, An hour or two after the end of Sommerfeld’s lecture, Wolf- gang would appear in the seminar, and our conversation would go something like this: Wolfgang: “Good morning. If it isn’t our prophet of nature! You look for all the world as if you have been living by the principles of St. Jean-Jacques. Wasn't it he who said, ‘Back to nature, up into the trees, you apes’?” “The second part of the quotation is not from Rousseau,” I would explain, “and none of us goes in for climbing trees. In any case, it isn’t morning; it’s twelve o'clock, if my watch is correct. One day you simply must introduce me to one of your nightly haunts so that I, too, can get a whiff of your physical inspiration.” “That wouldn't help you in the least. Still, you might perhaps care to tell me what you have managed to find out about Kramers’ work, on which you're supposed to lecture our class.” And so our talk would change quickly from good-humored insults to more pressing matters. When we talked about physics, we were often joined by our friend, Otto Laporte, whose sober, pragmatic approach made him an excellent mediator between Wolfgang and myself. He and Sommerfeld were later to publish important papers on the multiplet structure of atomic spectra. It was probably due to him that the three of us—Wolfgang, Otto and I—decided to go on a bicycle tour that took us from Benediktbauern across the Kesselberg to Lake Walchen and“UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 29 on into the Loisach Valley. This was probably the only time Wolfgang dared to enter my world—with the most beneficial results for myself: the talks we began during that tour and con- tinued in Munich were to have a lasting effect. Meanwhile we spent a few happy days on the road. Once we had reached the saddle of the Kesselberg, laboring uphill with our bicycles, we could ride effortlessly along a road boldly cut into the mountain slope past the steep western shore of Lake Walchen—at the time I had no idea how important this little spot of earth was to become for me one day. We passed the very place where an old man and his daughter had once joined Goethe’s coach en route to Italy, she the model of his future Mignon, he of the old harpist in Wilhelm Meister! Across this dark lake, Goethe caught his first glimpse of the snow-covered Alps. And while we, too, delighted in the glorious landscape, our conversation kept returning to our studies and to science in general. Thus Wolfgang asked me—I think it was one evening at an inn in Grainau—whether I at long last understood Einstein's relativity theory, on which Sommerfeld laid so much stress. I could only say that I did not really know what was meant by “under- standing” in physics. The mathematical framework of relativity theory caused me no difficulties, but that did not necessarily mean that I had “understood” why a moving observer means something different by “time” than an observer at rest. The whole thing baffled me, and struck me as being quite “incompre- hensible.”” “But once you have grasped the mathematical framework,” Wolfgang objected, “you can surely predict what an observer at rest and a moving observer ought to observe or measure. And we have good reason to assume that a real experiment will bear out these predictions. What more can you ask?” “That is precisely my problem,” I replied, “that I don’t know what more I can ask. I feel somewhat cheated by the logic of the new mathematical framework. You might even say that I have grasped the theory with my brain, but not yet with my heart. I think that I don’t have to study physics to know what ‘time’ after all, our every thought and action presupposes a naive time concept. Perhaps I could put it like this: our thought depends on30 PHYSICS AND BEYOND the fact that this time concept works, that we can operate with it. But if our naive time concept has to be changed, then we can no longer tell whether our language and thought remain useful working tools. In saying this, I am not trying to hark back to Kant, for whom time and space were a priori forms of the intui- tion. In other words, to Kant, as to the earlier physicists, time and space were absolutes. I only want to stress the fact that our language and thought become vague whenever we try to change such basic concepts, and uncertainty goes ill with true under- standing.” Otto found my scruples quite unnecessary. “That's how it may look in the schoolmen’s philosophy,” he said, “but if they ascribed definite, immutable meanings to the concepts of time and space, that only goes to show that their philosophy was false. I can't do anything with beautiful phrases about the ‘essence’ of space and time. You've probably read more philosophy than is good for you. Remember this splendid defini- tion: ‘Philosophy is the systematic misuse of nomenclature spe- cially invented for the purpose.’ All absolute claims must be rejected a priori. We ought only to use such words and concepts as can be directly related to sense perception, with this proviso, of course, that we may substitute complex physical observations for direct perception. It is precisely this return to observable phenomena that is Einstein's great merit. In his relativity theory, he quite rightly started with the commonplace assumption that time is what you read off a clock. If you keep to this common- place meaning, you will have few problems with relativity the- ory. As soon as a theory allows us to predict the results of an observation, it gives us all the understanding we need. Wolfgang now brought up a number of objections: “What you say is true only under certain conditions, and these ought to be stated. To begin with, you have to be certain that your theoreti- cal predictions are unambiguous and self-consistent. In the case of relativity theory, this is probably guaranteed by the simple mathematical framework. Next it must be quite clear from the conceptual structure of a theory to which particular phenomena it applies and to which it does not. In the absence of this qualification every theory can be refuted at once, simply because no theory can predict all the phenomena in the world, But even“UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 31 if all these conditions are met, I am still not altogether certain whether the ability to predict phenomena in a particular area entitles one to claim full understanding. Conversely, it may be quite possible to understand a particular realm of experience completely without being able to predict all the results of future observations.” I now tried to show that correct predictions were not neces- sarily a sign of true understanding by quoting an historical example. “You know, of course, that the Greek astronomer, Aristarchus, considered the possibility that the sun might occupy the center of our planetary system. This view was rejected by Hipparchus, and then fell into oblivion. Ptolemy started with the assumption that the earth was the central body, and he treated the orbits of the planets as superimposed cycles and epicycles. This enabled him to predict eclipses of the sun and the moon very precisely, so precisely that for fifteen hundred years his doctrine was considered the certain foundation of astronomy. But did Ptolemy really understand the planetary system? Was it not Newton who, knowing the law of inertia, and introducing force as the cause of changes of momentum, was the first to give a proper explanation of planetary motions in terms of gravitation? Was he not the first to have really understood this type of motion? This, to me, is a crucial question. “Or let us take an example from the more recent history of physics. At the end of the eighteenth century, when electrical phenomena became better known, physicists were able to make very precise calculations of the electrostatic forces governing the behavior of charged bodies, treating them as centers of force in the manner of Newtonian mechanics. That much at least I gath- ered from Sommerfeld. But it was only when Faraday changed the entire problem and inquired into fields of force, i.e., into the distribution of forces in time and space, that he provided a true understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, and laid the foun- dations on which Maxwell could later base his mathematical formulae.” Otto did not find my examples particularly convincing. “I can see only differences in degree, but no basic distinction. Ptolemy's astronomy must have been very good, else it would not have lasted for fifteen hundred years. Newton’s didn’t seem much32 PHYSICS AND BEYOND better at first; it took quite some time before astronomers came to appreciate that it led to more accurate predictions of the motions of the planets than Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles. I cannot really grant you that Newton did something fundamentally better than Ptolemy. He merely gave a different account of planetary mo- tions, one that happened to prove more successful in the long run.” Wolfgang found this argument too one-sided and much too positivistic. “I, for one, see a basic distinction between Newton's astronomy and Ptolemy's,” he said. “To begin with, Newton posed the whole problem quite differently: he inquired into the causes of planetary motions and not into the motions themselves. These causes, he discovered, were forces, and in our planetary system they happen to be much simpler than the motions. He described them by means of his law of gravitation. If we say that Newton helped us to understand the motion of the planets, we only mean that more precise observations have shown that it is possible to reduce the complicated motions of the planets to something very simple, namely, to gravitational forces, and to explain them in that way. Admittedly, Ptolemy could describe all the complicated motions of the planets by the superposition of cycles and epicycles, but he had to treat them as empirical facts. Moreover, Newton was also able to show that the motions of the planets are governed by the same laws as those that determine the motion of a projectile, the oscillation of a pendulum or the spinning of a top. The mere fact that Newton’s mechanics reduced all these different phenomena to a simple principle, namely, ‘mass x acceleration = force,’ shows that his planetary system is vastly superior to Ptolemy’ Otto still refused to admit defeat. “The word ‘cause’ and the assertion that force is the cause of motion all sound very well, but in fact only take us a slight step forward. For we are then com- pelled to ask the next question: What are the causes of forces in general and of gravitation in particular? In other words, accord- ing to your own philosophy, we can only claim ‘real’ understand- ing of planetary motions once we know the cause of gravitation, and so on ad infinitum.” Wolfgang objected strongly to this argument. “Of course we can keep on asking questions,” he said, “but isn’t that the basis““UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 33 of all science? Your argument is not relevant to the point under discussion. ‘Understanding’ nature surely means taking a close look at its connections, being certain of its inner workings. Such knowledge cannot be gained by understanding an isolated phe- nomenon or a single group of phenomena, even if one discovers some order in them, It comes from the recognition that a wealth of experiential facts are interconnected and can therefore be reduced to a common principle. In that case, certainty rests precisely on this wealth of facts. The danger of making mistakes is the smaller, the richer and more complex the phenomena are, and the simpler is the common principle to which they can all be brought back. The fact that still wider connections may yet be discovered makes no difference at all.” “And so you think,” I asked, “that we can trust in relativity theory on the grounds that it helps us to combine under a common heading, or reduce to a common root, a great wealth of phenomena, for instance in electrodynamics? If I understand you correctly, you are maintaining that, since in this case a uniform connection is readily established and can be shown to be mathe- matically transparent, we get the feeling that we have ‘under- stood’ relativity, even though we are forced to give the words ‘space’ and ‘time’ a new, or let us say a changed, meaning.” “Yes, I do mean something like that. The decisive steps of Newton and of Faraday were, in each case, their new way of asking questions and of formulating concepts by which the correct answers could be obtained. ‘Understanding’ probably means nothing more than having whatever ideas and concepts are needed to recognize that a great many different phenomena are part of a coherent whole. Our mind becomes less puzzled once we have recognized that a special, apparently confused situation is merely a special case of something wider, that as a result it can be formulated much more simply. The reduction of a colorful variety of phenomena to a general and simple prin- ciple, or, as the Greeks would have put it, the reduction of the many to the one, is precisely what we mean by ‘understanding.’ The ability to predict is often the consequence of understanding, of having the right concepts, but is not identical with under- standing.” Otto murmured: “ ‘The systematic misuse of nomenclature34 PHYSICS AND BEYOND specially invented for the purpose.’ I cannot for the life of me see why it is necessary to speak in such complicated ways about simple things. If we use language to refer to direct sense impres- sions, then few misunderstandings can arise—every word has a precise meaning, and if a theory sticks to that limitation, it will always be comprehensible, even without a lot of philosophizing.” But Wolfgang refused to accept this. “Your suggestion, which sounds so terribly plausible, has already been made, by Mach and others. It has even been said that Einstein arrived at his theory of relativity simply by sticking to Mach’s doctrine, But this strikes me as a crude oversimplification. It is well known that Mach did not believe in the existence of atoms, on the grounds that they cannot be observed. For all that, atoms were needed to explain a host of physical and chemical phenomena that had eluded scientists in the past. Mach himself was obviously led astray by the very principle you defend, and, as far as I am concerned, this was not by chance.” “Everybody can make mistakes,” Otto said, trying to calm us down. “But mistakes are no excuse for making things more complicated than they are. The theory of relativity is so simple that anyone can grasp it. But when it comes to atomic theory, things are very much more obscure.” This brought us to our second theme, which kept us busy long after our bicycle tour was over. It was to become the source of keen arguments in our Munich seminar, often in Sommerfeld’s presence. The central subject of Sommerfeld’s seminar was Bohr’s atomic theory. Basing his ideas on decisive experiments by Rutherford, Bohr had depicted the atom as a tiny planetary system with a central nucleus which, though considerably smaller than the atom, carried most of its mass. About this nucleus, a number of extremely lightweight electrons revolved like so many planets. However, while the orbits of planets were determined by known forces and the past history of the system, and hence subject to perturbations, the orbits of electrons were said to call for additional postulates of a special kind, postulates that helped to explain the peculiar stability of matter when exposed to external influences. Ever since Planck had published his famous work in 1g00, these additional postulates were known as quantum con-“UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 35 ditions, and it was they which had introduced into atomic physics that strange element of number mysticism to which I referred earlier. Certain magnitudes that could be computed from an orbit were said to be integral multiples of a basic unit, namely, Planck's quantum of action. Such rules were highly reminiscent of Pythagorean ideas, according to which two vibrating strings were in harmony if, with equal tension, their lengths were in simple proportion. But what did the orbits of electrons have to do with vibrating strings? Even more confusing was the new ex- planation of light emission by atoms. In this process, a radiating electron was said to jump from one quantum orbit to the next, and to emit the energy thus liberated as a whole packet, or light quantum. Such ideas would never have been taken seriously had they not helped to explain a whole range of experiments with great accuracy. This peculiar mixture of incomprehensible mumbo jumbo and empirical success quite naturally exerted a great fascination on us young students. Soon after the beginning of my studies, Sommerfeld set me a test: from the observations which an experi- mental physicist of his acquaintance had communicated to him, I was to deduce the electron orbits and quantum numbers in- volved. The task itself was not difficult, but the results proved extremely perplexing; apart from integral quantum numbers, I was also forced to admit halves, and this ran counter to the spirit of quantum theory and of Sommerfeld’s number mysticism. Wolfgang suggested that I would soon have to introduce quarters and eighths as well, until finally the whole quantum theory would crumble to dust in my capable hands. And try as I might, I could not get rid of the embarrassing fraction. Wolfgang had set himself a more difficult task. He wanted to find out whether in a more complicated system, one that could only be determined by astronomical computations, Bohr’s theory and the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum conditions would still lead to experimentally valid results. In fact, during our Munich dis- cussions, some of us had begun to feel that the earlier successes of the theory might have been due to the use of particularly simple systems, and that the theory would break down in a slightly more complicated one. In this connection, Wolfgang asked me one day: “Do you36 PHYSICS AND BEYOND honestly believe that such things as electron orbits really exist inside the atom?” My answer may have sounded a little labored. “To begin with,” I told him, “we can observe the path of an electron in a cloud chamber: it leaves a clear trail of fog where it has passed. And since there is such a thing as an electron trajectory in the cloud chamber, we may take it that it will occur in the atom as well. But I have some reservations on that score. For while we determine the path itself by classical Newtonian methods, we use quantum conditions to account for its stability, thus flying in the face of Newtonian mechanics. And when it comes to electrons jumping from one orbit into the next—as the theory demands— we are careful not to specify whether they make high jumps, long jumps or some other sorts of jump. It all makes me think that something is radically wrong with the whole idea of electron orbits. But what is the alternative?” Wolfgang nodded. “The whole thing seems a myth. If there really were such a thing as an electron orbit, the electron would obviously have to revolve periodically, with a given frequency. Now, we know from electrodynamics that if an electrical charge is set in periodic motion, it must emit electrical vibrations, i.e., radiate light of a characteristic frequency. But this is not sup- posed to happen with the electron; instead, the frequency of vibration of the emitted light is said to lie somewhere between the orbital frequency before the mysterious jump and the orbital frequency after the jump. All this is sheer madness.” “*Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't,’” I quoted. “Yes, perhaps. Niels Bohr claims that he can tell the electron orbits of every atom in the periodic system, and the two of us do not even believe in the existence of such orbits. Sommerfeld perhaps disagrees with us. And, in fact, anyone can see electronic orbits in a cloud chamber. Quite likely Niels Bohr is right in a sense, though we cannot tell precisely in what sense.” Unlike Wolfgang, I felt optimistic about the issue, and I may have said something like this: “I find Bohr's physics most fasci- nating, difficulties and all. Bohr must surely know that he starts from contradictory assumptions which cannot be correct in their present form. But he has an unerring instinct for using these very“UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 37 assumptions to construct fairly convincing models of atomic processes. Bohr uses classical mechanics or quantum theory just as a painter uses his brushes and colors. Brushes do not deter- mine the picture, and color is never the full reality; but if he keeps the picture before his mind's eye, the artist can use his brush to convey, however inadequately, his own mental picture to others. Bohr knows precisely how atoms behave during light emission, in chemical processes and in many other phenomena, and this has helped him to form an intuitive picture of the structure of different atoms; a picture he can only convey to other physicists by such inadequate means as electron orbits and quantum conditions. It is not at all certain that Bohr himself believes that electrons revolve inside the atom. But he is con- vinced of the correctness of his picture. The fact that he cannot yet express it by adequate linguistic or mathematical techniques is no disaster. On the contrary, it is a great challenge.” Wolfgang remained skeptical. “I must first of all find out whether the Bohr-Sommerfeld assumptions will lead to reason- able results in the case of my problem. If not—and I almost sus- pect that I shall discover just that—I shall at least know what does not work, and that, too, is a great step forward.” Then he added reflectively: “Bohr’s pictures may be right after all. But what are we to make of them, and what laws do they express?” Some time later, Sommerfeld asked me rather unexpectedly, after a long talk about atomic theory: “Would you like to meet Niels Bohr? He is about to give a series of lectures in Géttingen. I have been invited, and I should like to take you along.” I hesitated for a moment—the fare to Géttingen and return was quite beyond my financial resources. Perhaps Sommerfeld saw the shadow flit across my face. In any case, he quickly added that he would see to my expenses, whereupon I accepted with grati- tude and alacrity. In the early summer of 1922 Gottingen, that friendly little town of villas and gardens on the slopes of the Hain Mountain, was a mass of blooming shrubs, rose gardens and flower beds. Nature herself seemed to approve the name we later gave those wonderful days: the Géttingen Bohr Festival. I shall never forget the first lecture. The hall was filled to capacity. The great Danish physicist, whose very stature proclaimed him a Scandi-38 PHYSICS AND BEYOND navian, stood on the platform, his head slightly inclined, and a friendly but somewhat embarrassed smile on his lips. Summer light flooded in through the wide-open windows. Bohr spoke fairly softly, with a slight Danish accent. When he explained the individual assumptions of his theory, he chose his words very care- fully, much more carefully than Sommerfeld usually did. And each one of his carefully formulated sentences revealed a long chain of underlying thoughts, of philosophical reflections, hinted at but never fully expressed. I found this approach highly excit- ing; what he said seemed both new and not quite new at the same time. We had all of us learned Bohr's theory from Sommer- feld, and knew what it was about, but it all sounded quite different from Bohr’s own lips. We could clearly sense that he had reached his results not so much by calculation and demon- stration as by intuition and inspiration, and that he found it difficult to justify his findings before Géttingen’s famous school of mathematics. Each lecture was followed by long discussions, and at the end of the third lecture I myself dared to make a critical remark, Bohr had been talking about Kramers’ contribution—the sub- ject on which I had been asked to speak in Sommerfeld’s seminar —and he concluded that, although the basis of Kramers’ theory was still unexplained, it seemed certain that the results were correct and would one day be confirmed by experiment. I then rose and advanced objections to Kramers’ theory based on our Munich discussions. Bohr must have gathered that my remarks sprang from pro- found interest in his atomic theory. He replied hesitantly, as though he were slightly worried by my objection, and at the end of the discussion he came over to me and asked me to join him that afternoon on a walk over the Hain Mountain, There we might go more deeply into the whole problem. This walk was to have profound repercussions on my scientific career, or perhaps it is more correct to say that my real scientific career only began that afternoon. A well-tended mountain path took us past a popular coffeehouse, Zum Rohns, to a sunlit height, from which we looked down on the small university town, dominated by the spires of the old churches of St. John and St. Jacob and, beyond, across the Leine Valley.“UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 39 Bohr opened the conversation. “This morning,” he said, “you expressed some reservations about Kramers’ work. I must tell you at once that I fully understand the nature of your doubts. Per- haps I ought to explain where I stand myself. Basically, I agree with you much more than you might think; I realize full well how cautious one has to be with assertions about the structure of atoms. I had best begin by telling you a little about the history of this theory. My starting point was not at all the idea that an atom is a small-scale planetary system and as such governed by the laws of astronomy. I never took things as literally as that, My starting point was rather the stability of matter, a pure miracle when considered from the standpoint of classical physics. “By ‘stability’ I mean that the same substances always have the same properties, that the same crystals recur, the same chemical compounds, etc. In other words, even after a host of changes due to external influences, an iron atom will always remain an iron atom, with exactly the same properties as before. This cannot be explained by the principles of classical mechanics, certainly not if the atom resembles a planetary system. Nature clearly has a tendency to produce certain forms—I use the word ‘forms’ in the most general sense—and to recreate these forms even when they are disturbed or destroyed. You may even think of biology: the stability of living organisms, the propagation of the most compli- cated forms which, after all, can exist only in their entirety. But in biology we are dealing with highly complex structures, subject to characteristic, temporary transformations of a kind that need not detain us here. Let us rather stick to the simpler forms we study in physics and chemistry. The existence of uniform sub- stances, of solid bodies, depends on the stability of atoms; that is precisely why an electron tube filled with a certain gas will always emit light of the same color, a spectrum with exactly the same lines. All this, far from being self-evident, is quite inexplicable in terms of the basic principle of Newtonian physics, according to which all effects have precisely determined causes, and according to which the present state of a phenomenon or process is fully determined by the one that immediately preceded it. This fact used to disturb me a great deal when I first began to look into atomic physics. “The miracle of the stability of matter might have gone un-40 PHYSICS AND BEYOND noticed even longer had experiments during the past few decades not thrown fresh light on the whole subject. Planck, as you know, discovered that the energy of an atomic system changes discon- tinuously; that when such a system emits energy, it passes through certain states with selected energy values. I myself later coined the term ‘stationary states’ for them. Next came Ruther- ford’s crucial studies of the structure of the atom. It was in Rutherford’s Manchester laboratory that I first became ac- quainted with the problems involved. At the time, I was barely older than you are today, and I kept plying Rutherford with long questions, Physicists had just begun to take a closer look at luminous phenomena and were busily determining the character- istic spectral lines of the various chemical elements; needless to say, chemists, too, produced a wealth of information on the behavior of atoms. These developments, which I was privileged to witness at close quarters, naturally made me wonder how all these things hung together. The theory I tried to put forward was meant to do no more than establish that connection. “Now, this was really a hopeless task, quite different from those physicists normally tackle. For in all previous physics, or in any other branch of science, you could always try to explain a new phenomenon by reducing it to known phenomena or laws. In atomic physics, however, all previous concepts have proved inadequate. We know from the stability of matter that New- tonian physics does not apply to the interior of the atom; at best it can occasionally offer us a guideline. It follows that there can be no descriptive account of the structure of the atom; all such accounts must necessarily be based on classical concepts which, as we saw, no longer apply. You see that anyone trying to develop such a theory is really trying the impossible. For we intend to say something about the structure of the atom but lack a language in which we can make ourselves understood. We are in much the same position as a sailor, marooned on a remote island where conditions differ radically from anything he has ever known and where, to make things worse, the natives speak a completely alien tongue. He simply must make himself understood, but has no means of doing so. In that sort of situation a theory cannot ‘explain’ anything in the usual strict scientific sense of the word. All it can hope to do is to reveal connections and, for the rest,“UNDERSTANDING” IN MODERN PHYSICS 4. leave us to grope as best we can. That is precisely what Kramers’ calculations were intended to do; perhaps I failed to stress this sufficiently at my lecture. And to do more than that is quite beyond our present means.” From Bohr's remarks it was quite obvious that he was familiar with all the doubts we ourselves had been expressing. But to make doubly sure that I had understood him, I asked: “If that is all we can do, what is the point of all those atomic models you produced and justified during the past few lectures? What ex- actly did you try to prove with them?” “These models,” Bohr replied, “have been deduced, or if you prefer guessed, from experiments, not from theoretical calcula- tions. I hope that they describe the structure of the atoms as well, but only as well, as is possible in the descriptive language of classical physics. We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. ‘The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.” “But in that case how are we ever to make progress? After all, physics is supposed to be an exact science.” “It seems likely that the paradoxes of quantum theory, those incomprehensible features reflecting the stability of matter, will become sharper with every new experiment. If that happens, we can only hope that, in due course, new concepts will emerge which may somehow help us to grasp these inexpressible proc- esses in the atom. But we are still a long way from that.” Bohr's remark reminded me of Robert’s comment, during our walk near Lake Starnberg, that atoms were not things. For although Bohr believed that he knew a great many details about the inner structure of atoms, he did not look upon the electrons in the atomic shell as “things,” in any case not as things in the sense of classical physics, which worked with such concepts as position, velocity, energy and extension. I therefore asked him: “If the inner structure of the atom is as closed to descriptive accounts as you say, if we really lack a language for dealing with it, how can we ever hope to understand atoms?” Bohr hesitated for a moment, and then said: “I think we may yet be able to do so, But in the process we may have to learn what the word ‘understanding’ really means.”42 PHYSICS AND BEYOND Our little walk had taken us to the peak of the Hain Mountain, to the famous Kehr Inn, so called because since olden times peo- ple used to turn back here [umkehren]. We, too, now made for the lowland, this time in a southerly direction, and looked down over the hills, woods and villages of the Leine Valley, long since incorporated into Géttingen town. “We have talked about so many difficult subjects,” Bohr con- tinued, “and I have told you how I myself first got into this whole business; but I know nothing at all about you. You look very young. From your questions, it almost seems as if you started with atomic theory first, and then went on to take a look at orthodox physics. Sommerfeld must have introduced you to this adventurous world of atoms at a very early age. Do tell me about it and also about what you did in the war.” I confessed that, being twenty, I was only in my fourth term at the university, and that I knew very little indeed about general physics. I went on to tell him about Sommerfeld’s class, where I had been especially attracted by the mysterious, inexplicable features of quantum theory. I added that I had been too young to serve in the army, but that my father had fought in France as a reserve officer and I had been very anxious about him. He was wounded in 1916 and was sent back home. During the last year of the war, I worked as a farm laborer in the Lower Bavarian Alps, to keep body and soul together. Otherwise I had been spared by the war. “I should like to hear a lot more from you,” Bohr said, “‘and to learn more about conditions in your country, of which I know so little. And about the Youth Movement, of which I have heard so much from my colleagues in Géttingen. You must pay us a visit in Copenhagen; perhaps you could stay with us for a term, and we might do some physics together. And then I'll show you round our small country and tell you about its history.” As we approached the edge of the town, the conversation turned to Géttingen’s leading physicists and mathematicians— Max Born, James Franck, Richard Courant and David Hilbert, all of whom I had only just met. Bohr suggested that I might do part of my studies under them, Suddenly the future looked full of hope and new possibilities, which, after seeing Bohr home, I painted to myself in the most glorious colors all the way back to my lodgings.4 Lessons in Politics and History (1922-1924) The summer of 1922 ended on what, for me, was a rather sadden- ing note. My teacher, Sommerfeld, had suggested that I attend the Congress of German Scientists and Physicians in Leipzig, where Einstein, one of the chief speakers, would lecture on the general theory of relativity. My father had bought me the return- trip ticket from Munich, and I was looking forward greatly to this chance of hearing the discoverer of relativity theory in person. Once in Leipzig, I moved into one of the cheapest inns in the poorest quarter of the city—I could afford nothing better. Then I made for the meeting hall, where I found a number of the younger physicists whose acquaintance I had made in Gét- tingen during the “Bohr Festival,” and asked them about Ein- stein’s lecture, scheduled within a few hours. I noticed a certain tension all around me, which struck me as being rather odd, but then Leipzig was not Géttingen. I filled in the waiting time with a walk to the Memorial (to the great Battle of Leipzig), where, hungry and exhausted by the overnight railway journey, I lay down on the grass and at once fell asleep. I was wakened by a young girl who had decided to pelt me with plums. She sat down beside me, and made her peace with me with generous offerings of fruit from her ample basket. The lecture theater was a large hall with doors on all sides. As I was about to enter, a young man—I learned later that he was an assistant or pupil of a well-known professor of physics in a South German university—pressed a red handbill into my hand, warning me against Einstein and relativity. The whole theory44 PHYSICS AND BEYOND was said to be nothing but wild speculation, blown up by the Jewish press and entirely alien to the German spirit. At first I thought the whole thing was the work of some lunatic, ‘for madmen are wont to turn up at all big meetings. However, when I was told that the author was a man renowned for his experi- mental work, to whom Sommerfeld had often referred in his lectures, I felt as if part of my world were collapsing. All along, I had been firmly convinced that science at least was above the kind of political strife that had led to the civil war in Munich, and of which I wished to have no further part. And now I made the sad discovery that men of weak or pathological character can inject their twisted political passions even into scientific life. Needless to say, my immediate reaction was to drop any reserva- tions I may have had with regard to Einstein's theory, or rather to what I knew about it from Wolfgang’s occasional explana- tions. For if I had learned one thing from my experiences during the civil war, it was that one must never judge a political movement by the aims it so loudly proclaims and perhaps genuinely strives to attain, but only by the means it uses to achieve them. The choice of bad means simply proves that those responsible have lost faith in the persuasive force of their origi- nal arguments. In this instance, the means applied by a leading physicist in his attempt to refute the theory of relativity were so bad and insubstantial that they could signify only one thing: the man had abandoned all hope of ever refuting the theory with scientific arguments. Still, so upset was I by this spectacle that I failed to pay proper attention to Einstein himself, and, at the end of the lecture, forgot to avail myself of Sommerfeld’s offer to introduce me to the speaker. Instead, I returned somberly to my inn, only to discover that all my possessions—rucksack, linen, socks and sec- ond suit—had been stolen. Luckily I still had my return ticket. I went to the station and took the next train to Munich. I was in utter despair because I knew that my father would find it extremely hard to make up my loss. And so, upon discovering that my parents were out of the city, I took a job as a woodman in Forstenried Park, south of the town. The pines there had been attacked by bark beetles, and a large number of trees had to be felled and their bark burned. Only when I had earned enoughLESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 45 money to replenish my meager wardrobe did I return to my studies, I have mentioned this whole unhappy episode, not to resurrect events that are best forgotten, but because it later cropped up in my conversations with Niels Bohr and affected my behavior in the dangerous no-man’s land between science and politics. At first, the Leipzig experience left me with a deep sense of disap- pointment and with doubts about the validity of science in general. For if science, too, was more concerned with private feuds than with discovering the truth, was it really worth bother- ing with? Luckily, in the end, memories of my walk with Niels Bohr prevailed over all such pessimistic thoughts, and I was hopeful that I might one day avail myself of Bohr’s generous invitation and have many more talks with him in Copenhagen. As it happened, a year and a half were to go by before this came to pass. Meanwhile I spent a term at Géttingen, submitted a thesis on the stability of laminar flow in fluids, sat for my examination in Munich and, for another term, served as Max Born’s assistant in Gottingen. During the Easter vacation of 1924 I finally boarded the Warnemiinde ferry for Denmark. Through- out the trip I feasted my eyes on a host of colorful boats, including four-masters in full rig. At the end of the First World War, a large part of the world’s merchant fleet had ended up at the bottom of the sea, with the result that the old sailing boats had to be brought out again, and the seascape looked all the brighter for it—much as it had done a hundred years before. When I eventually disembarked, I had some trouble with cus- toms—I knew no Danish and could not account for myself properly. However, as soon as it became clear that I was about to work in Professor Bohr’s Institute, all difficulties were swept out of the way and all doors were opened to me. And so from the very outset I felt safe under the protection of one of the greatest personalities in this small but friendly country. Not that my first few days in the Institute were particularly easy for me. I suddenly came face to face with a large number of brilliant young men from every part of the world, all of them greatly superior to me, not only in linguistic prowess and world- liness, but also in their knowledge of physics. I saw very little of Bohr himself; he obviously had his hands full with administra-46 PHYSICS AND BEYOND tive tasks, and I obviously had no right to make greater claims on his time than had other members of the Institute. But after a few days, he came into my room and asked me to join him for a few days’ walking tour through the island of Zealand. In the Insti- tute itself, he said, there was little chance for lengthy talks, and he wanted to get to know me better. And so the two of us set out with our rucksacks. First we took the trolley to the northern edge of the city, and from there we walked through the Deer Park, once a hunting preserve. We admired the beautiful little Hermitage Castle right in its center, and watched large herds of deer graze in the clearings. Then we made for the north, sometimes hugging the coast, sometimes walking through forests and past peaceful lakes, studded with summer houses still sleeping behind closed shutters—it was early spring and the trees were only just putting out their first tender shoots. Our talk turned to conditions in Germany, and Bohr asked what I remembered about the outbreak of war, ten years before. “I have heard a great deal about those days,” he told me. “Friends of ours who traveled through Germany early in August 1914 spoke of a great wave of enthusiasm that gripped not only the whole German nation but even outsiders, whose emotions, however, were tempered with horror. Isn’t it odd that a whole people should have gone into war in a flush of war fever, when they ought to have known how many friends and enemies alike that war would swallow up, how many injustices would be committed by both sides? Can you explain any of this?” “I was only twelve at the time,” I replied, “and obviously my opinions were based on what I picked up from conversations between my parents and grandparents. Still, I don’t think the words ‘war fever’ quite describe the situation. No one I knew was happy about what lay before us, and no one was pleased that the war had started. If you ask me to describe what happened, I would say we suddenly realized that things had become serious. We felt that we had all been living in a world of dreams, and that this beautiful world had suddenly been shattered by the murder of the heir to the Austrian crown. Suddenly we were face to face with reality, with a call none of us could refuse, a call we had to answer come what may—with heavy hearts, but with all our hearts nonetheless. Needless to say, we were all convinced ofLESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 47 the justice of the German cause, for Germany and Austria were like one country, and the murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdi- nand and his wife by members of a secret Serbian society struck us as a crime against us all. So we had to defend ourselves, and, as I have said, most Germans decided to do so wholeheartedly. “Now, such popular decisions have something highly seductive about them, something quite uncanny and irrational—even 1 could feel that in August 1914. I was traveling with my parents from Munich to Osnabriick, where my father, who was a captain in the Reserves, had to report for duty. All the railway stations were filled with shouting crowds of excited people; freight cars, decorated with flowers and branches, were packed with soldiers and guns. Young women and children stood alongside them; there was much crying and singing until the train left the station. You could address any stranger you wanted to as if you were old friends; everyone helped everyone else—we had all become brothers in fate. I should not like to eradicate this day from my memory. And yet this incredible, this unimaginable day, a day no one who witnessed it could forget, had nothing to do with what is commonly called war fever. I think that the whole thing was distorted after the event.” “You must realize,” Bohr said, “that we, in our small country, take quite a different view of such matters. Look at it historically. Perhaps Germany's expansion during the last century proved just a little too easy. There was first of all the war against our country in 1864, which caused so much bitterness among us, then your victory over Austria in 1866 and over France in 1870. To Ger- mans, it must have looked as if a great Central European Empire could be built almost overnight. But things aren’t ever that simple. To found empires one must first win the hearts of the people. This the Prussians, for all their efficiency, obviously failed to do; perhaps because their way of life was too hard, or perhaps because their ideas of discipline did not appeal to others. By the time Germany came to realize that, it was too late. In any case, the German attack on the small country of Belgium struck the out- side world as an act of blatant aggression, in no way justified even by the assassination of the Austrian heir. After all, Belgium had nothing to do with the assassination, nor was it a party to any alliance against Germany.” “Certainly we Germans committed a great many wrongs in48 PHYSICS AND BEYOND that war,” I had to admit, “just as our opponents did. But then war is bound to lead to wrongs. And I must also admit that the only tribunal competent to decide the issue—world history—has found against us. Otherwise, I am probably much too young to judge which politicians made the right or wrong decisions in which places. But there are two things that have always bothered me, and I should like to know what you think about them. “I told you that when war was declared, the whole world seemed completely changed. All petty, everyday cares suddenly disappeared. Personal and family relationships, once the very center of our lives, gave way to the broader solidarity of a whole nation sharing a common fate. Houses, streets, forests—every- thing looked quite different, or, as Jakob Burckhardt has put it, ‘Heaven itself took on a fresh hue.’ My best friend, a cousin from Osnabriick, who was a few years older than I, became a soldier. I do not know whether he was conscripted or whether he volunteered. Such questions were never even asked. The great decision had been made, everyone who was physically fit joined the army. My cousin would never have had the least wish to make war on anyone, or to fight for German conquests, though he was certain of our victory. So much I gathered from our last conversation just before he left. All we knew was that he was expected to offer his life, like all the rest. He may for a moment have been deeply frightened, but still he said yes like everyone else. Had I been a few years older, I would probably have done the same thing. My cousin died in France. Do you think he ought to have told himself that the whole war was nonsense, a fever, mass suggestion, and have refused this call on his life? Who has the right to decide? A young man who could not possibly hope to see through the machinations of world politics, who knew no more than a few facts, difficult enough to grasp in themselves: a murder in Sarajevo or our invasion of Belgium?” “What you tell me makes me very sad,” Bohr replied, “for I think I can see what you are getting at. Perhaps what these young men felt as they went to war, certain of their cause, is part of the greatest happiness men can experience. But surely that is a terrible truth, When men go to war, don’t you feel that they some- how resemble migratory birds who flock together in the autumnLESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 49 before heading south? None of these birds knows which has decided on the flight or even why they must migrate, but each is gripped by the same prevailing agitation, the same wish to join in, even if the flight leads to death. In human beings, the re- markable fact is that, on the one hand, the reaction is as ele- mental and as uncontrollable as, for instance, a forest fire or any other natural phenomenon, while, on the other hand, it releases a sense of almost boundless individual freedom. The young man who goes to war has thrown off the burden of his daily cares and worries. When life or death is at stake, petty reservations, all those qualms that normally restrict our lives, are cast to the winds. We have only one aim—victory—and life seems simple and clear as never before. There is probably no more beautiful description of this unique situation in the life of a young man than the trooper’s song in Schiller’s Wallenstein. You must know the last lines: ‘Who would share life must risk it, and none who refuse the hazard shall gain it—who risks it may lose!’ This is probably quite true. Yet for all that, we must say no, must make every effort to avoid wars, indeed all international conflicts from which wars arise. Our walk through Denmark may be a small step in that direction.” “I should like to put my second question, if I may,” I con- tinued. “You have spoken of the Prussian sense of discipline, and have told me that it does not appeal to other people. I myself grew up in southern Germany, and our tradition is such that we think somewhat differently from people born between Magde- burg and Kénigsberg. Yet the principles of Prussian life—the subordination of individual ambition to the common cause, modesty in private life, honesty and incorruptibility, gallantry and punctuality—have always attracted me. Even though these principles have been misused by politicians, 1 cannot really despise them. Why do you Danes, for instance, feel so differ- ently?” “I believe,” Bohr said, “that we do appreciate the virtues of this Prussian attitude. But we prefer to give greater scope to the individual, to his dreams and plans, than the Prussian principle permits. We wish to be part of a community of free people, each of whom fully recognizes the rights of all the others. Freedom and individual independence are more important to us than50 PHYSICS AND BEYOND strength derived from external discipline. It is very strange, isn’t it, that our ideas of the good life should so often be molded by historical models, which have survived only in myths or legends, and yet retain their hold on us. The Prussian, I believe, models himself on the Teutonic knight, who swore the monk's vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, who spread the Christian light, sword in hand. We in Denmark prefer the heroes of the Icelandic sagas, the poet Egill, son of Skallagrim, who at the tender age of three defied his father, fetched himself a horse and followed Skallagrim on his long ride. Or the wise Njall, who was better versed in the law than all men on the island, and whose advice was sought in all disputes. These men, or their ancestors, had gone to Iceland because they did not want to bend to the will of the mighty Norwegian kings. They refused to serve masters who could order them into a war that was the king's and not their own, They were all of them brave warriors and I am afraid lived chiefly on piracy. When you read these sagas, you will probably be horrified by all the talk of fighting and killing. But these men wanted above all to be free, and they respected the right of others to be as free as they were themselves. They fought over possessions or honor, but not for power over others. “Naturally, we cannot tell to what extent these sagas are based on historical fact. But within these terse chronicles of life in Iceland we can sense a great poetic force, so that it is not surpris- ing that they should have continued to mold our ideas of freedom to this day. Life in Britain, also, where the Normans were once so prominent, has been stamped by this spirit of independence. The British form of democracy, the Englishman's sense of fairness and respect for the ideas and interests of others, his high regard for justice and law, may well derive from the same source. No doubt, that is why the British were able to build up a great empire. Admittedly, they, too, were guilty of acts of violence, much as the old Vikings were.” It was afternoon now, and we were walking close to the shore, through small fishermen’s villages. Across the Gresund we could see the Swedish coast a few miles away bathed in the setting sun. ‘When we reached Helsingér, it was getting dark, but we decided to take a quick walk through the precincts of Kronborg Castle, which dominates the narrowest part of the Gresund, and whoseLESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 51 ramparts still bristle with old guns, symbols of a power long since gone. Bohr began to tell me about the history of this castle. Frederick I] of Denmark had it built toward the end of the sixteenth century, in the Dutch Renaissance style. The walls no less than the bastion jutting out far into the Gresund serve as reminders of its military past. In the seventeenth century Swedish prisoners of war were still locked up in its casements. But now, as we stood next to the old guns in the dusk looking alternately across at the sailing boats on the Gresund and the tall Renais- sance building behind us, we clearly sensed the harmony of a spot in which struggle had long since ceased. True, you still feel the pull of forces that once drove men against one another, destroying ships, raising cries of victories and screams of despair, but you also know that they no longer shape people’s lives. One gets a direct, almost physical sense of peace all around. Kronborg Castle, or rather the spot on which it stands, is connected with the legend of Hamlet, the Danish Prince who went mad or shammed madness to escape the machinations of his murderous uncle. Bohr mentioned the legend and went on to say: “Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and the ram- parts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet's ‘To be or not to be.’ Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thir- teenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depths he was made to reveal, and so, he, too, had to be found a place on earth, here in Kronborg. And once we know that, Kronborg becomes quite a different castle for us.”” While we were talking, dusk had turned almost into night; a cold wind was blowing across the Gresund and forced us to leave. By next morning, the wind had freshened considerably. The52 PHYSICS AND BEYOND sky was swept clean, and across the bright blue Baltic we could see the Swedish coast as far as Kullen Peninsula in the north. We walked westward along the northern shore of Zealand, some seventy to a hundred feet above sea level and here and there sheer above the waves. Looking across to Kullen, Bohr said: “You grew up in Munich close to the mountains, and you have told me a great deal about your mountain walks. I know that mountain- dwellers must find Denmark terribly flat and boring. Perhaps you will never be able to like my country. But to us the sea is all- important. As we look across it, we think that part of infinity lies within our grasp.” “I can sense that,” I replied, ‘and I noticed it particularly in the faces of the fishermen we met yesterday on the beach—people here have a distant, serene look. In the mountains things are quite different. There the eye passes from the nearby detail over rather complicated rock formations or icy peaks straight up to the sky. Perhaps that is why our people are so gay.” “We have only one mountain in Denmark,” Bohr explained. “It is just over five hundred feet high and strikes us as so mag- nificent that we call it the Heavenly Peak. It is said that, when one of our compatriots tried to impress a Norwegian friend with this splendid phenomenon, the visitor looked at it disdain- fully and said, ‘That's what we call a dump in Norway.’ I hope you won't be so hard on our landscape. But please tell me some- thing about your own mountain walks with friends from the Youth Movement.” “We often set out for several weeks at a time. Last summer we went from Wiirzburg across the Rhén Mountains as far as the southern edge of the Harz Mountains, and from there by way of Jena and Weimar back into the Thuringian Forest and on to Bamberg. When it's warm enough, we usually sleep out in the open, but more often we sleep in a tent, or, if the weather is too bad, in a farmer's hay barn. Sometimes to pay for our shelter, we help with the harvest, and occasionally, if we make ourselves particularly useful, we get all sorts of wonderful farm fare as well. Otherwise we cook for ourselves, generally over a campfire in the forest, and in the evenings we read stories by the light of the logs or we sing or play music. Members of the Youth Move-LESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 53 ment have collected many old folk songs and have arranged them for parts with violin and flute accompaniment. Such music- making gives us all a great deal of pleasure, even though we often play it badly rather than well. “Perhaps we sometimes imagine ourselves in the medieval role of traveling scholars, and compare the catastrophe of the last war and the subsequent political strife with the hopeless confusion of the Thirty Years’ War, which in spite of its horrors is said to have inspired many of these songs. A feeling of kinship with that age seems to have seized young people all over Germany. I remember being stopped in the street by an unknown boy, who asked me to join a mass meeting of young people in an ancient castle. And, indeed, when I got there, scores of young people were already streaming toward the place, which stands in a most picturesque spot in the Swabian Jura and looks down from an almost vertical rock into the Altmithl Valley. I was quite overcome by the forces generated at this spontaneous gathering, much as I was on the first of August, 1914. Otherwise, our Youth Movement has very little to do with political issues.” “The life you describe seems highly romantic, and I would be quite tempted to share it. Moreover, I can see that you are swayed by the chivalrous ideals of which we spoke yesterday. But you don’t have to take an oath, do you, before you join, as the Freemasons do?” “No, there is no written or even unwritten rule to which we have to adhere. Most of us are far too skeptical for any such rituals, But perhaps I ought to add that we do observe certain rules, although no one orders us to. For instance, we don’t smoke, we drink very little, we dress far too simply for our parents’ liking, and I don’t think any of us are very interested in night life or in bars—but there is no written code.” “And what happens if one of you breaks these rules?” “I don’t know, perhaps we simply laugh at him. But it just doesn’t happen.” “Isn't it uncanny, or perhaps I should say marvelous,” said Bohr, “how much magical power the old images retain? That after so many centuries they should still affect people, without written laws or external coercion? We spoke yesterday of monas-54 PHYSICS AND BEYOND tic vows, and the monk's first two rules are highly commendable. Nowadays they amount to modesty and a willingness to adopt a somewhat harder, more continent life. But I hope you won't stress the third rule, obedience, too soon, or else there may be dangerous political consequences. You know that I think far more highly of the two Icelanders, Egill and Njall, than of the masters of your Prussian orders. “But you have told me that you were present during the civil war in Munich. You must surely have wondered about such general questions as the role of the state in the life of society. What bearing does all this have on your life in the Youth Movement?” “During the civil war,” I replied, “I sided with the govern- ment because the whole fight seemed quite senseless to me, and I hoped that it would end more quickly that way. But I must admit that I had a rather bad conscience toward our opponents. Ordinary Germans, and particularly the workers, had fought wholeheartedly for our victory in the war, had made the same sacrifices as everyone else. Their criticism of the ruling classes was absolutely justified, for our rulers had confronted the German people with an insoluble problem. Hence I felt that it was abso- lutely essential to make friendly contacts with the workers as soon as the civil war was over. That was also the view of a great many members of the Youth Movement. “Four years ago, for instance, we helped run extracurricular classes in Munich, and I myself was rash enough to give a series of lectures on astronomy, pointing out the various constellations to some hundreds of workers and their wives, describing the motions of the planets and their distances from each other, and trying to interest them in the structure of our Milky Way. With a young lady, I also helped give a course of lectures on the German opera. She sang arias and I accompanied her on the piano; and afterward she would give brief summaries of the history and structure of the various operas. The whole thing was amateurish in the extreme, but I do believe that the audience appreciated our good intentions and that they enjoyed our recitals as much as we did. This was also the time when many young people in the Youth Movement turned to elementary school teaching, as a result of which I imagine that many of our elementary schoolsLESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 55 have much better teachers than quite a few of our so-called high schools. “I quite understand why people abroad might look upon our Youth Movement as too romantic and idealistic, and why they are afraid it might be diverted into the wrong political channels. But I have no fears on that score, certainly not in the immediate present—atter all, a great deal of good has already come out of the movement. I am thinking particularly of the revival of interest in old music—in Bach, plain song and ballads—of at- tempts to revive the old handicrafts, to bring beauty into the homes of even the very poor, and of all the efforts to awaken interest in the arts through amateur dramatic or music groups.” “I’m glad to see that you're so optimistic,” Bohr said. “But now and then our papers also tell us about more ominous, anti- Semitic, trends in Germany, obviously fostered by demagogues. Have you come across any of that yourself?” “Yes, in Munich such groups have begun to make quite a bit of a noise. They enjoy the support of some of the old officers who've been unable to come to terms with Germany's defeat. But we don't take these groups very seriously. After all, you can’t base rational politics on resentment alone. What is far worse is that reputable scientists should see fit to repeat all this stuff like so many parrots.” And I told him of my experiences in Leipzig, where relativity theory had been the subject of political slanders. At the time neither of us had the least idea just what terrible consequences would one day spring from these apparently unimportant politi- cal aberrations, but more of this later. At the time Bohr’s reply was directed at the resentful old officers as much as at the physi- cist who refused to come to terms with relativity theory. “You see, once again I prefer the English attitude to the German. The English try to play the game, but they also try to be good losers. Prussians, on the other hand, think that losing is a disgrace, though they, too, preach magnanimity in victory, and that I find highly creditable. But the English go one step further: they expect the vanquished to be magnanimous to the victor, to accept their defeat and to bear no grudges. If they can, they have achieved the next best thing to victory. They are free men among free people. 1 am reminded of the old Vikings again.56 PHYSICS AND BEYOND Perhaps that makes me a romantic in your eyes, but I take the whole thing much more seriously than you may perhaps believe.” “Oh, no, I see how serious you are,” I told him. We had meanwhile reached Gilleleje, on the northern tip of Zealand. The beach, which in summer is crowded with happy holiday makers, was utterly deserted on this cold day. We picked up a few flat stones and tried our skill at making them skim the water, or aimed them at old fishermen’s baskets or bits of drift- wood. Bohr told me that, shortly after the war, he had visited this beach with Kramers, and that they had spotted a German mine with its detonator sticking up above the waves. They had tried to throw stones at the detonator but had merely kept hit- ting the mine itself—until they realized that if either of them had scored a bull’s-eye, there would have been no one to tell the tale. On the rest of our walk, too, Bohr and I amused ourselves by flinging stones at distant objects. On one occasion this activity again gave rise to a conversation about the powers of the imagi- nation. I happened to see a telegraph pole quite a long distance away, almost too far to be reached with a stone. When the improbable nevertheless happened, and I hit it on my first attempt, Bohr became reflective: “If you had thought first about your aim, or about the correct angle of your arm and wrist, you wouldn't have had the least chance of scoring a hit. But since you were unreasonable enough to imagine that you could hit the target without special effort, why, you did it.” We then had a lengthy discussion about the role of images and concepts in atomic physics. But more of this in another chapter. We spent the night in a lonely inn at the edge of a forest in the northwestern part of the island. Next morning Bohr showed me around his country house in Tisvilde, in which we were later to have so many conversations about atomic physics. At this time of the year, the house was not yet ready to receive guests. Then we made our way back to Copenhagen and stopped briefly in Hilleréd, catching a glimpse of Frederiksborg Castle, a splendid Renaissance building in the Dutch style. It was surrounded by a lake and parklands and had obviously once served as a royal hunting lodge. I could sense that Bohr had a much greater likingLESSONS IN POLITICS AND HISTORY 57 for Hamlet’s castle in Kronborg than for this rather trivial monument to the courtly life. No wonder, therefore, that the conversation turned back to atomic physics, a subject that was to fill so many of our future thoughts and perhaps the most impor- tant part of our lives.5 Quantum Mechanics and a Talk with Einstein (1925-1926) During these critical years, atomic physics developed much as Niels Bohr had predicted it would during our walk over the Hain Mountain. The difficulties and inner contradictions that stood in the way of a true understanding of atoms and their stability seemed unlikely to be removed or even reduced—on the contrary, they became still more acute. All attempts to surmount them with the conceptual tools of the older physics appeared doomed to failure. There was, for instance, the discovery by the American physi- cist, Arthur Holly Compton, that light (or more precisely X- rays) changes its wavelength when radiation is scattered by free electrons. This result could be explained by Einstein's hypothesis that light consists of small corpuscles or packets of energy, mov- ing through space with great velocity and occasionally—eg., during the process of scattering—colliding with an electron. On the other hand, there was a great deal of experimental evidence to suggest that the only basic difference between light and radio waves was that the former are of shorter length; in other words, that a light ray is a wave and not a stream of particles. Moreover, attempts by the Dutch physicist, Ornstein, to determine the intensity ratio of spectral lines in a so-called multiplet had pro- duced very strange results. These ratios can be determined with the help of Bohr's theory. Now it appeared that, although the formulae derived from Bohr’s theory were incorrect, a minor modification produced new formulae that fitted the experimentalQUANTUM MECHANICS AND A TALK WITH EINSTEIN 59 results. And so physicists gradually learned to adapt themselves to a host of difficulties. They became used to the fact that the concepts and models of classical physics were not rigorously applicable to processes on the atomic scale. On the other hand, they had come to appreciate that, by skillful use of the resulting freedom, they could, on occasion, guess the correct mathematical formulation of some of the details. In the seminars run by Max Born in Gottingen during the summer of 1924, we had begun to speak of a new quantum mechanics that would one day oust the old Newtonian mechanics, and whose vague outlines could already be discerned here and there. Even during the subsequent winter term, which I once again spent in Copenhagen, trying to develop Kramers’ theory of dispersion phenomena, our efforts were devoted not so much to deriving the correct mathematical relationships as to guessing them from similarities with the formulae of classical theory. If I think back on the state of atomic theory in those months, I always remember a mountain walk with some friends from the Youth Movement, probably in the late autumn of 1924. It took us from Kreuth to Lake Achen. In the valley the weather was poor, and the mountains were veiled in clouds. During the climb, the mist had begun to close in upon us, and, after a time, we found ourselves in a confused jumble of rocks and undergrowth with no signs of a track. We decided to keep climbing, though we felt rather anxious about getting down again if anything went wrong. All at once the mist became so dense that we lost sight of one another completely, and could keep in touch only by shouting. At the same time it grew brighter overhead, and the light suddenly changed color. We were obviously under a patch of moving fog. Then, quite sud- denly, we could see the edge of a steep rock face, straight ahead of us, bathed in bright sunlight. The next moment the fog had closed up again, but we had seen enough to take our bearings from the map. After a further ten minutes of hard climbing we were standing in the sun—at saddle height above the sea of fog. To the south we could see the peaks of the Sonnwend Mountains and beyond them the snowy tops of the Central Alps, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.60 PHYSICS AND BEYOND In atomic physics, likewise, the winter of 1924-1925 had obvi- ously brought us to a realm where the fog was thick but where some light had begun to filter through and held out the promise of exciting new vistas. In the summer term of 1925, when I resumed my research work at the University of Géttingen—since July 1924 I had been Privatdozent at that university—I made a first attempt to guess what formulae would enable one to express the line intensities of the hydrogen spectrum, using more or less the same methods that had proved so fruitful in my work with Kramers in Copenhagen. This attempt led to a dead end—I found myself in an impene- trable morass of complicated mathematical equations, with no way out. But the work helped to convince me of one thing: that one ought to ignore the problem of electron orbits inside the atom, and treat the frequencies and amplitudes associated with the line intensities as perfectly good substitutes. In any case, these magnitudes could be observed directly, and as my friend Otto had pointed out when expounding on Einstein's theory during our bicycle tour round Lake Walchensee, physicists must consider none but observable magnitudes when trying to solve the atomic puzzle. My attempt to apply this scheme to the hydrogen atom had come to grief on the complications of this particular problem. Accordingly, I looked for a simpler mathematical system and found it in the pendulum, whose oscillations could serve as a model for the molecular vibrations treated by atomic physics. My work along these lines was advanced rather than retarded by an unfortunate personal setback. Toward the end of May 1925, I fell so ill with hay fever that I had to ask Born for fourteen days’ leave of absence. I made straight for Heligoland, where I hoped to recover quickly in the bracing sea air, far from blossoms and meadows. On my arrival I must have looked quite a sight with my swollen face; in any case, my landlady took one look at me, concluded that I had been in a fight and promised to nurse me through the aftereffects. My room was on the second floor, and since the house was built high up on the southern edge of the rocky island, I had a glorious view over the village, and the dunes and the sea beyond. As I sat on my balcony, I had ample opportunity to reflect on Bohr’s remark that part of infinity seems to lie within the grasp of those who look across the sea.QUANTUM MECHANICS AND A TALK WITH EINSTEIN 61 Apart from daily walks and long swims, there was nothing in Heligoland to distract me from my problem, and so I made much swifter progress than I would have done in Gottingen. A few days were enough to jettison all the mathematical ballast that invariably encumbers the beginning of such attempts, and to arrive at a simple formulation of my problem. Within a few days more, it had become clear to me what precisely had to take the place of the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum conditions in an atomic physics working with none but observable magnitudes. It also became obvious that with this additional assumption I had introduced a crucial restriction into the theory. Then I noticed that there was no guarantee that the new mathematical scheme could be put into operation without contradictions. In particu- lar, it was completely uncertain whether the principle of the conservation of energy would still apply, and I knew only too well that my scheme stood or fell by that principle. Other than that, however, several calculations showed that the scheme seemed quite self-consistent. Hence I concentrated on demonstrating that the conservation law held, and one evening I reached the point where I was ready to determine the individual terms in the energy table, or, as we put it today, in the energy matrix, by what would now be considered an extremely clumsy series of calculations. When the first terms seemed to accord with the energy principle, I became rather excited, and I began to make countless arithmetical errors. As a result, it was almost three o'clock in the morning before the final result of my compu- tations lay before me. The energy principle had held for all the terms, and I could no longer doubt the mathematical consistency and coherence of the kind of quantum mechanics to which my calculations pointed. At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me. I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea. I now did so without too much trouble, and waited for the sun to rise. What I saw during that night in Heligoland was admittedly not very much more than the sunlit rock edge I had glimpsed in62 PHYSICS AND BEYOND the autumn of 1924, but when I reported my results to Wolfgang Pauli, generally my severest critic, he warmly encouraged me to continue along the path I had taken. In Géttingen, Max Born and Pascual Jordan took stock of the new possibilities, and in Cambridge the young English mathematician Paul Dirac devel- oped his own methods for solving the problems involved, and after only a few months the concentrated efforts of these men led to the emergence of a coherent mathematical framework, one that promised to embrace all the multifarious aspects of atomic physics. Of the extremely intensive work which kept us breathless for a few months I shall say nothing here; instead, I shall report my talk with Albert Einstein following a lecture on the new quantum mechanics in Berlin. At the time, the University of Berlin was considered the strong- hold of physics in Germany, with such renowned figures as Planck, Einstein, von Laue and Nernst. It was here that Planck had discovered quantum theory and that Rubens had confirmed it by special measurements of thermal radiation; it was here that Einstein had formulated his general theory of relativity and his theory of gravitation in 1916. At the center of scientific life was the so-called physics colloquium, which probably went back to the time of Helmholtz and which was generally attended by the entire staff of the physics department. In the spring of 1926, I was invited to address this distinguished body on the new quantum mechanics, and since this was my first chance to meet so many famous men, I took good care to give a clear account of the concepts and mathematical foundations of what was then a most unconventional theory. I apparently managed to arouse Ein- stein’s interest, for he invited me to walk home with him so that we might discuss the new ideas at greater length. On the way, he asked about my studies and previous research. As soon as we were indoors, he opened the conversation with a question that bore on the philosophical background of my recent work. “What you have told us sounds extremely strange. You assume the existence of electrons inside the atom, and you are probably quite right to do so, But you refuse to consider their orbits, even though we can observe electron tracks in a cloud chamber. I should very much like to hear more about your reasons for making such strange assumptions.”QUANTUM MECHANICS AND A TALK WITH EINSTEIN 63 “We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom,” I must have replied, “but the radiation which an atom emits during discharges enables us to deduce the frequencies and correspond- ing amplitudes of its electrons. After all, even in the older physics wave numbers and amplitudes could be considered substitutes for electron orbits. Now, since a good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes, I thought it more fitting to re- strict myself to these, treating them, as it were, as representatives of the electron orbits.” “But you don't seriously believe,” Einstein protested, “that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?” “Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity?” I asked in some surprise. “After all, you did stress the fact that it is impermissible to speak of absolute time, simply because absolute time cannot be observed; that only clock readings, be it in the moving reference system or the system at rest, are relevant to the determination of time.” “Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning,” Einstein ad- mitted, “‘but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has actually observed. But on prin- ciple, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe. You must appreciate that observation is a very complicated process. The phenomenon under observation produces certain events in our measuring apparatus. As a result, further processes take place in the appa- ratus, which eventually and by complicated paths produce sense impressions and help us to fix the effects in our consciousness. Along this whole path—from the phenomenon to its fixation in our consciousness—we must be able to tell how nature functions, must know the natural laws at least in practical terms, before we can claim to have observed anything at all. Only theory, that is, knowledge of natural laws, enables us to deduce the underlying phenomena from our sense impressions. When we claim that we can observe something new, we ought really to be saying that, although we are about to formulate new natural laws that do not agree with the old ones, we nevertheless assume that the existing laws—covering the whole path from the phenomenon to our64 PHYSICS AND BEYOND consciousness—function in such a way that we can rely upon them and hence speak of ‘observations.’ “In the theory of relativity, for instance, we presuppose that, even in the moving reference system, the light rays traveling from the clock to the observer's eye behave more or less as we have always expected them to behave. And in your theory, you quite obviously assume that the whole mechanism of light transmission from the vibrating atom to the spectroscope or to the eye works just as one has always supposed it does, that is, essentially accord- ing to Maxwell's laws. If that were no longer the case, you could not possibly observe any of the magnitudes you call observable. Your claim that you are introducing none but observable mag- nitudes is therefore an assumption about a property of the theory that you are trying to formulate. You are, in fact, assuming that your theory does not clash with the old description of radia- tion phenomena in the essential points. You may well be right, of course, but you cannot be certain.” I was completely taken aback by Einstein's attitude, though I found his arguments convincing. Hence I said: “The idea that a good theory is no more than a condensation of observations in accordance with the principle of thought economy surely goes back to Mach, and it has, in fact, been said that your relativity theory makes decisive use of Machian concepts. But what you have just told me seems to indicate the very opposite, What am I to make of all this, or rather what do you yourself think about in” “It’s a very long story, but we can go into it if you like. Mach’s concept of thought economy probably contains part of the truth, but strikes me as being just a bit too trivial. Let me first of all produce a few arguments in its favor. We obviously grasp the world by way of our senses. Even when small children learn to speak and to think, they do so by recognizing the possi- bility of describing highly complicated but somehow related sense impressions with a single word, for instance, the word ‘ball.’ They learn it from adults and get the satisfaction that they can make themselves understood. In other words, we may argue that the formation of the word, and hence of the concept, ‘ball’ is a kind of thought economy enabling the child to combine very complicated sense impressions in a simple way. Here Mach doesQUANTUM MECHANICS AND A TALK WITH EINSTEIN 65 not even enter into the question which mental or physical predispositions must be satisfied in man—or the small child— before the process of communication can be initiated. With animals, this process works considerably less effectively, as every- one knows, but we shan’t talk about that now. Now Mach also thinks that the formation of scientific theories, however complex, takes place in a similar way. We try to order the phenomena, to reduce them to a simple form, until we can describe what may be a large number of them with the aid of a few simple concepts. “All this sounds very reasonable, but we must nevertheless ask ourselves in what sense the principle of mental economy is being applied here. Are we thinking of psychological or of logical econ- omy, or, again, are we dealing with the subjective or the objec- tive side of the phenomena? When the child forms the concept ‘ball,’ does he introduce a purely psychological simplification in that he combines complicated sense impressions by means of this concept, or does this ball really exist? Mach would probably answer that the two statements express one and the same fact. But he would be quite wrong to do so. To begin with, the asser- tion ‘The ball really exists’ also contains a number of statements about possible sense impressions that may occur in the future. Now future possibilities and expectations make up a very impor- tant part of our reality, and must not be simply forgotten. Moreover, we ought to remember that inferring concepts and things from sense impressions is one of the basic presuppositions of all our thought. Hence, if we wanted to speak of nothing but sense impressions, we should have to rid ourselves of our lan- guage and thought. In other words, Mach rather neglects the fact that the world really exists, that our sense impressions are based on something objective. “I have no wish to appear as an advocate of a naive form of realism; I know that these are very difficult questions, but then I consider Mach’s concept of observation also much too naive. He pretends that we know perfectly well what the word ‘observe’ means, and thinks this exempts him from having to discriminate between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ phenomena. No wonder his principle has so suspiciously commercial a name: ‘thought econ- omy.’ His idea of simplicity is much too subjective for me. In reality, the simplicity of natural laws is an objective fact as well,66 PHYSICS AND BEYOND and the correct conceptual scheme must balance the subjective side of this simplicity with the objective. But that is a very diffi- cult task. Let us rather return to your lecture. “I have a strong suspicion that, precisely because of the problems we have just been discussing, your theory will one day get you into hot water. I should like to explain this in greater detail. When it comes to observation, you behave as if everything can be left as it was, that is, as if you could use the old descriptive language. In that case, however, you will also have to say: in a cloud chamber we can observe the path of the electrons, At the same time, you claim that there are no electron paths inside the atom. This is obvious nonsense, for you cannot possibly get rid of the path simply by restricting the space in which the electron moves.” I tried to come to the defense of the new quantum mechanics. “For the time being, we have no idea in what language we must speak about processes inside the atom. True, we have a mathe- matical language, that is, a mathematical scheme for determining the stationary states of the atom or the transition probabilities from one state to another, but we do not know—at least not in general—how this language is related to that of classical physics. And, of course, we need this connection if we are to apply this theory to experiments in the first place. For when it comes to experiments, we invariably speak in the traditional language. Hence I cannot really claim that we have ‘understood’ quantum mechanics. I assume that the mathematical scheme works, but no link with the traditional language has been established so far. And until that has been done, we cannot hope to speak of the path of the electron in the cloud chamber without inner contra- dictions. Hence it is probably much too early to solve the diffi culties you have mentioned.” “Very well, I will accept that,” Einstein said. “We shall talk about it again in a few years’ time. But perhaps I may put another question to you. Quantum theory as you have ex- pounded it in your lecture has two distinct faces. On the one hand, as Bohr himself has rightly stressed, it explains the stability of the atom; it causes the same forms to reappear time and again. On the other hand, it explains that strange discontinuity or inconstancy of nature which we observe quite clearly when weQUANTUM MECHANICS AND A TALK WITH EINSTEIN 67 watch flashes of light on a scintillation screen. These two aspects are obviously connected. In your quantum mechanics you will have to take both into account, for instance when you speak of the emission of light by atoms. You can calculate the discrete energy values of the stationary states. Your theory can thus account for the stability of certain forms that cannot merge con- tinuously into one another, but must differ by finite amounts and seem capable of permanent re-formation. But what happens during the emission of light? As you know, I suggested that, when an atom drops suddenly from one stationary energy value to the next, it emits the energy difference as an energy packet, a so-called light quantum. In that case, we have a particularly clear example of discontinuity. Do you think that my conception is correct? Or can you describe the transition from one stationary state to another in a more precise way?” In my reply, I must have said something like this: “Bohr has taught me that one cannot describe this process by means of the traditional concepts, i.e., as a process in time and space. With that, of course, we have said very little, no more, in fact, than that we do not know. Whether or not I should believe in light quanta, I cannot say at this stage. Radiation quite obviously involves the discontinuous elements to which you refer as light quanta. On the other hand, there is a continuous element, which appears, for instance, in interference phenomena, and which is much more simply described by the wave theory of light. But you are of course quite right to ask whether quantum mechanics has anything new to say on these terribly difficult problems. I believe that we may at least hope that it will one day. “T could, for instance, imagine that we should obtain an inter- esting answer if we considered the energy fluctuations of an atom during reactions with other atoms or with the radiation field. If the energy should change discontinuously, as we expect from your theory of light quanta, then the fluctuation, or, in more precise mathematical terms, the mean square fluctuation, would be greater than if the energy changed continuously. I am in- clined to believe that quantum mechanics would lead to the greater value, and so establish the discontinuity. On the other hand, the continuous element, which appears in interference experiments, must also be taken into account. Perhaps one must68 PHYSICS AND BEYOND imagine the transitions from one stationary state to the next as so many fade-outs in a film. The change is not sudden—one picture gradually fades while the next comes into focus so that, for a time, both pictures become confused and one does not know which is which. Similarly, there may well be an intermediate state in which we cannot tell whether an atom is in the upper or the lower state.” “You are moving on very thin ice,” Einstein warned me. “For you are suddenly speaking of what we know about nature and no longer about what nature really does. In science we ought to be concerned solely with what nature does. It might very well be that you and I know quite different things about nature. But who would be interested in that? Perhaps you and I alone. To everyone else it is a matter of complete indifference. In other words, if your theory is right, you will have to tell me sooner or later what the atom does when it passes from one stationary state to the next.” “Perhaps,” I may have answered. “But it seems to me that you are using language a little too strictly. Still, I do admit that everything that I might now say may sound like a cheap excuse. So let's wait and see how atomic theory develops.” Einstein gave me a skeptical look. “How can you really have so much faith in your theory when so many crucial problems remain completely unsolved?” I must certainly have thought for a long time before I pro- duced my answer. “I believe, just like you, that the simplicity of natural laws has an objective character, that it is not just the result of thought economy. If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty—by forms I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are ‘true,’ that they reveal a genuine feature of nature. It may be that these forms also cover our subjective relationship to nature, that they reflect elements of our own thought economy. But the mere fact that we could never have arrived at these forms by ourselves, that they were revealed to us by nature, suggests strongly that they must be part of reality itself, not just of our thoughts about reality. “You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty IQUANTUM MECHANICS AND A TALK WITH EINSTEIN 69 am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of the mathematical schemes with which nature presents us. You must have felt this, too: the almost frightening simplicity and whole- ness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared. And this feeling is something completely different from the joy we feel when we have done a set task particularly well. That is one reason why I hope that the problems we have been discussing will be solved in one way or another. In the present case, the simplicity of the mathematical scheme has the further conse- quence that it ought to be possible to think up many experi- ments whose results can be predicted from the theory. And if the actual experiments should bear out the predictions, there is little doubt but that the theory reflects nature accurately in this par- ticular realm.” “Control by experiment,” Einstein agreed, “‘is, of course, an essential prerequisite of the validity of any theory. But one can’t possibly test everything. That is why I am so interested in your remarks about simplicity. Still, I should never claim that I really understood what is meant by the simplicity of natural laws.” After talking about the role of truth criteria in physics for quite a bit longer, I took my leave. I next met Einstein a year and a half later, at the Solvay Congress in Brussels, where the epistemological and philosophical bases of quantum theory once again formed the subject of the most exciting discussions.6 Fresh Fields (1926-1927) If I were asked what was Christopher Columbus’ greatest achievement in discovering America, my answer would not be that he took advantage of the spherical shape of the earth to get to India by the western route—this idea had occurred to others before him—or that he prepared his expedition meticulously and rigged his ships most expertly—that, too, others could have done equally well. His most remarkable feat was the decision to leave the known regions of the world and to sail westward, far beyond the point from which his provisions could have got him back home again. In science, too, it is impossible to open up new territory unless one is prepared to leave the safe anchorage of established doc- trine and run the risk of a hazardous leap forward. With his relativity theory, Einstein had abandoned the concept of simul- taneity, which was part of the solid ground of traditional physics, and, in so doing, outraged many leading physicists and philoso- phers and turned them into bitter opponents. In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas—and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed. However, when it comes to entering new territory, the very struc- ture of scientific thought may have to be changed, and that is far more than most men are prepared to do. How great their reluc- tance could be had been brought home to me at the Leipzig Con- gress, and I fully expected that similar obstacles would be placed in the path of atomic physics. During the first few months of 1926, at about the same time that I delivered my lecture in Berlin, Géttingen first becameFRESH FIELDS m familiar with the work of the Viennese physicist, Erwin Schré- dinger, who was approaching atomic theory from an entirely fresh side. The year before, Louis de Broglie in France had drawn attention to the fact that the strange wave-particle dual- ism which, at the time, seemed to prevent a rational explanation of light phenomena might be equally involved in the behavior of matter, for instance of electrons. Schrédinger developed this idea further and, by means of a new wave equation, formulated the law governing the propagation of material waves under the in- fluence of an electromagnetic field. In Schrédinger’s model, the stationary states of an atomic shell are compared with the sta- tionary vibrations of a system, for instance of a vibrating string, except that all the magnitudes normally considered as energies of the stationary states are treated as frequencies of the sta- tionary vibrations. The results Schrédinger obtained in this way fitted in very well with the new quantum mechanics, and Schrédinger quickly succeeded in proving that his own wave mechanics was mathematically equivalent to quantum mechan- ics; in other words, that the two were but different mathematical formulations of the same structures. Needless to say, we were delighted by this new development, for it greatly strengthened our confidence in the correctness of the new mathematical formu- lation, Moreover, Schrédinger’s procedure lent itself readily to the simplification of calculations that had severely strained the powers of quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, however, the physical interpretation of the mathematical scheme presented us with grave problems. Schré- dinger believed that, by associating particles with material waves, he had found a way of clearing the obstacles that had so long blocked the path of quantum theory. According to him, these material waves were fully comparable to such processes in space and time as electromagnetic or sound waves. Such obscure ideas as quantum jumps would completely disappear. I had no faith in a theory that ran completely counter to our Copenhagen concep- tion and was disturbed to see that so many physicists greeted precisely this part of Schrédinger’s doctrine with a sense of liberation. The many talks I had had with Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and many others over the years had convinced me that it was impossible to build up a descriptive time-space model of