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Precisely what that fundamental uncertainty tells us about the basic nature of the subatomic world is a question theorists have been wrestling with for decades. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, for example, believed that before you pinned a particle down by measuring it, the particle was literally in several places at once. The act of measurement, he suggested, forced the particle to choose one location over all the others...
More important, he serves as a symbol of all the scientists--such as Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, even the ones he disagreed with--who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age--the Bomb, space travel, electronics--all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which...
...theories of Werner Heisenberg and others who showed how the wave-particle duality implies a randomness or uncertainty in nature and that particles are affected simply by observing them. This made Einstein uncomfortable. As he famously and frequently insisted, "God does not play dice." (Retorted his friendly rival Niels Bohr: "Einstein, stop telling God what to do.") He spent his later years in a failed quest for a unified theory that would explain what appeared to be random or uncertain...
Coach Frank Haggerty, entering his 18th season at the helm, understands that the expected success of this year's team is by no means guaranteed. "As Niels Bohr discovered, predictions are very difficult, especially when it comes to the future," Haggerty said. "The possibilities are very good. We could have a very powerful team, but right now we don't. We have to work hard and put forth the effort...
Sudoplatov reports a conversation between Bohr and Yakov Terletsky, a Soviet physicist and intelligence agent, in Denmark in 1945. Terletsky supposedly told Bohr that a nuclear reactor built in the U.S.S.R. would not work, and Bohr gave precise advice on what went wrong and how to fix it. The conversation did occur, but Bohr's son Aage, who was present, insists his father gave away no technical secrets. His account was backed up by Terletsky -- at least according to Roald Sagdeev, a former Soviet physicist now teaching at the University of Maryland, and other scholars who have read...