That might explain why Einstein wasn’t very productive in his last decades, but his opposition to the uncertainty principle etc. predates his tenure at the IAS. Maybe he would’ve come around had he been in a more productive setting? I kind of doubt it—it seems to have been a pretty deep-seated, philosophical disagreement—but who knows.
Heisenberg spent his later career as head of the Max Planck Institute. I can’t imagine many scientists enjoy administrative duties, but he does seem to have had more contact with the rest of the scientific world than Einstein did.
Baram Sosis
Karma: 45
Thanks for the context on the physics! So it sounds like I wasn’t entirely fair to Heisenberg, that this was a genuinely difficult conceptual issue that “could’ve gone either way”?
I see, thanks again for the context! The book doesn’t mention S-matrices (at least not by name), and it wasn’t clear to me from reading it whether Heisenberg was particularly active scientifically by the 60′s/70′s or whether he was just some old guy ranting in the corner. I guess that’s the risk of reading primary sources without the proper context.