Post by Marco Tavora Ph.D.

In his excellent book "Dreams of a Final Theory," Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg describes Heisenberg's 1925 paper, where he essentially created modern quantum mechanics as "pure magic." He writes, "I have tried several times to read the paper [...], and, although I think I understand quantum mechanics, I have never understood Heisenberg's motivations for the mathematical steps in his paper... Theoretical physicists in their most successful work tend to play one of two roles: they are either sages or magicians." He continues, "...the magician-physicists, [...] do not seem to be reasoning at all but who jump over all intermediate steps to a new insight about nature..." He then mentions Einstein, as an example of sage: "...in developing general [...] relativity, he was playing the role of a sage; he had a well-defined problem - how to fit the theory of gravitation into the new view of space and time that he had proposed in 1905... It is usually not difficult to understand the papers of sage-physicists, but the papers of magician-physicists are often incomprehensible." Heisenberg's 1925 paper is called by many "Heisenberg's 'Magical' Paper of July 1925". #science #physics #mathematics #quantummechanics