Word: bohr
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Speed Sirs: Your account of Professor Bohr's application of Professor Werner Heisenberg's concept of uncertainty to "everyday existence, where an inch is an inch, and a gallon is a gallon" (TIME, July 3, p. 40) recalled to mind an entertaining bit og testimony given in a lawsuit in which my father was counsel for one of the litigants. The case involved an automobile collision. Immediately before the collision, one of the automobiles had struck a cow; and during the trial it became important for the plaintiff to bring out the speed with which this...
Relativity and uncertainty are absolute facts, reasoned Theorist Bohr in effect. Through them mathematicians are able to describe the tremendous, strange activities within an atom. But only one kind of activity at a time. For, the essential nature of atomic (or quantum) mechanics is duality. You can determine where an electron is or how fast it is moving, but not both facts simultaneously...
Since this essential duality is true for atoms, reasoned Theorist Bohr, it must be true of all things out of which atoms are made. This general duality he called "complementarity," and proceeded to elaborate his thesis abstrusely. The net of his discourse was that if you live inside a ball, you cannot have any conception of its outside convexity, until you get outside. Then you cannot be sure of the internal concavity. Likewise you never can know all the causes of a specific result or all the effects of a single action. With uncertainty of cause & effect goes uncertainty...
...audience felt better when Professor Bohr, fiddling with a loudspeaker cord, short-circuited the apparatus and made it blare. It was much easier, and more pleasant, to understand round-faced young Professor Ernest Orlando Lawrence of the University of California tell how he transmuted elements with "deuton" bullets...
...Chemist Francis William Aston of Cambridge, England. Physicist Niels Bohr and Neurologist August Krogh of Copenhagen, Neurologist Archibald Vivian Hill of London. Chemist Theodor Svedberg of Upsala...