Epstein Secrets

determined by phenomena that lie well beneath the surface of our experience—phenomena that don't rely in any way upon our existence. In this sense, Einstein was wrong: "God" does appear to play dice with the universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But like playing at the craps table, our luck

ot implemented. Novel ideas generally stagnate and die without the courage to implement them. I bring this up here because perhaps the true mark of Einstein's ge- nius was not his mathematical prowess (although, contrary to conven- tional wisdom, he was mathematically talented), but his creativity and hi

, he polished off his ideas about the quantum behavior of atoms and sent it off to Born, who submitted it for publication. You may be familiar with Heisenberg's name, not least because of the 2P_Glealer-StoryEverTold_Atirdd B4 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286006 A Universe Stranger than fiction 85 famous

t least three children with various mistresses, and whose wave equation is the most famous icon of quantum mechanics. Instead I will focus first on Heisenberg, or rather not Heisenberg himself, but instead the result that made his name famous: the Heisen- berg uncertainty principle. This is often interpret

Newton was an extraordinary man. He discovered many of the physical principles we use today, and his view of the Universe reigned unchallenged until Einstein’s discovery of relativity. He was also, by many accounts, a nasty piece of work. Not only was he a famous academic, he also head of the Royal Mint. H

k. Who cares why? In 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist working at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (“CERN’), devised a way to test Einstein’s hidden variable theory. He pointed out that if photons possess hidden variables and we randomly measure them with a detector set at three angles, w

but it does not.) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016007 318 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Uncertainty If youknow alittle of quantum mechanics you might imagine Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle comes to our rescue. Heisenberg’s principle is often misunderstood. People sometimes try to explain it as an experimental pr

quantum craziness of reality was taken by an unlikely explorer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. In one sense, Dirac was the perfect man for the job. As Einstein is re- puted to have later said of him, "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful! When I think of Dirac, an old jok

but in this case it is the momentum of the particle that is related to the frequency of the probability wave associated with the particle. Hence, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation: If we want to localize a particle over a small region, i.e., have the width of the highest peak in its wave function as nar

it in Japan, so 2P_Glealer-StoryEverrold_Atirdd 142 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286064 Desperate Times and Desperate Measures 143 the problems of Heisenberg's proposal were already clear to him. Then in 1934 Yukawa read Fermi's theory of neutron decay, which catalyzed a new idea in Yukawa's mind. Perhap

a kind of deterministic control over the future, and that, of =ourse, was perceived to be very good news. If the radical developments =shered in by Einstein and Heisenberg in the twentieth century =hallenged this dream of control on one level—with our limited =erspectives there is only so much we were ca

erministic control over the future, and that, of =ourse, was perceived to be very good news. If the radical developments =shered in by Einstein and Heisenberg in the twentieth century =hallenged this dream of control on one level—with our limited =erspectives there is only so much we were capable of unders