Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

168 CHAPTER 37. QUANTUM MECHANICS: BOHR
• Bohr thought clearly, wrote obscurely, and thought of himself as a
prophet
• But what is light really? Is it a wave or a shower of photons? There
seems no likelihood for forming a consistent description of the phenomena
of light by a choice of only one of the two languages. It seems
as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the
other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind
of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately
neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they
do. (with Leopold Infeld in The Evolution of Physics).
• You (Born) believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law
and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly
speculative way, am trying to capture...Even the great initial success
of quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice
game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret
this as a consequence of senility. No doubt that day will come when we
shall see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.
• What we call science has the sole purpose of determining what is.
• This epistemology-soaked orgy ought to come to an end...No doubt, however,
you smile at me and think that, after all, many young heretic
turns into an old fanatic, and many young revolutionary becomes an
old reactionary.
• Almost all other fellows do not look from facts to the theory but from
the theory to the facts; they cannot extricate themselves from a once
accepted conceptual net, but only flop about it in a grotesque way.
37.3 Dirac
• Now we have to start all over again, because Einstein proved that it
does not work
37.4 Bohr
• Einstein, stop telling God what to do