Word: heisenberg
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...continue in this way, pulling at random from the grab bag of unpredictable news stories with happy endings. An attempt to Wikipedia “uncertainty principle” yields far too many Greek symbols for any still carbohydrate-glutted comprehension (although the page does include a pretty funny Heisenberg joke). I’m confident, though, that the Times is right—that it’s just these spontaneous, surprising events for which we should be most appreciative. Chance can admittedly pack a painful punch: Didn’t all those foreclosed mortgages take us unawares...
...most explicit attempt to address QM in literature can be found in Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen,” which imagines and reimagines the enigmatic meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Nazi-occupied Denmark of 1941. Heisenberg was working on the Nazi nuclear project (either on a bomb or a reactor—we still don’t know); Bohr was a Dane, and would later flee due to his Jewish ancestry. The meeting ended badly, and the two, once the best of friends, never spoke again...
This is exactly where Frayn’s play (which, for the record, I enjoyed) fails. “Copenhagen” outlines an “irritable reaching after fact & reason” as Bohr and Heisenberg search to accurately reconstruct their fateful meeting. But every time they get one part of the story down, another part becomes immeasurable—pseudo-uncertainty relations. The play ends with nothing resolved, the characters having accepted the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” But it’s a stretch...
...Fate keeps stomping him, he embraces Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. What he tells his class about the theory - "Even if you can't figure it out, you're still responsible for it on the midterm" - applies, in spades, to his crumbling life. And yet for most of the movie he hangs in there, behaving honorably, seeking the wisdom of his ancestors, trying to observe the Jewish concept of Hashem. "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you," says Elie Wiesel's Rashi. To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive...
...society's characteristics today will not necessarily shape what it will look like tomorrow. History rarely runs in straight and predictable lines. At the end of the 19th century, Germany - or perhaps more accurately, Germanic central Europe - was a technological and scientific powerhouse, its universities nurturing geniuses like Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, whose discoveries changed the way we thought of, well, everything. Then came the carnage of World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, the mass murder of European Jews and the flight of those who could escape it, often to the U.S. All of this...