Word: heisenberg
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...thing about the society is that it exists at all. It is successor to the old Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founded in 1911 under the patronage of Germany's last emperor. By the '20s, the original society had attracted a galaxy of scientific stars, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Fritz Haber and Max Planck, whose quantum theory is the cornerstone of modern physics. When the Nazis came to power in the '30s, the society's fortunes sagged. Planck, who was head of the society during those turbulent years, tried to stop the Nazis from interfering...
...coming to that particular realization, Holzman grasps what his diary finally means. The very act of observing an event, of recording it on film, makes it something other than what it is. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to cinema, and Holzman finally loses all illusions about the possibilities of pure documentary; lived life recorded is no longer lived life; transparent, diamond-hard cinema verite is no closer to the real than the images on the Nixon-Paramount silver screen...
Born finally provided an answer. Unlike the motion of celestial bodies, he said, the movement and position of electrons cannot be precisely determined. Only the statistical probability of their position can be ascertained with accuracy. The idea was brilliantly elaborated by Bern's colleague, Werner Heisenberg, but it provoked serious challenge. Even Bern's old friend, Einstein, with whom he often played violin sonatas, did not believe that particle motion-or, indeed, any basic phenomena in nature-was so completely in the grip of chance. "God may be subtle," said Einstein, "but he is not malicious...
...Apropos your flying-saucer Essay [Aug. 4], the implication is that most scientists insist that their laws are absolutely valid. Yet even Einstein is now being questioned, and there is uncertainty about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. As knowledge is gathered, the old "laws" are found more and more to apply only to special cases. Faster-than-light travel will probably be possible when our frame of reference has expanded far enough...
WHDH offered a prize for the funniest saying sent in. Potter wrote, "In the Heisenberg representation of quantum electrodynamics, the radiative corrections to the scattering matri are best evaluated using the anti-commutater of the renormalized Green's function with its irreducible Spinner invariant." It didn't win, but the announcer read it on the air because "it sounded profound...