Book Review: Uncertainty - Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindley - Page 2

Uncertainty also discusses the lives and contributions of a number of mainly German scientists in the first three decades of the 20th century.  Lindley is especially interested in these men as individuals, often very different individuals, of various political and religious and cultural persuasions, who argued over and ultimately contributed to the discovery of the Heisenberg principle.  The three main players according to Lindley were Neils Bohr (not a German but a Dane), Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg, from southern Germany.  (Lindley discusses many others as well).  Einstein was renowned as the genius whose special and general theories of relativity changed modern concepts of the universe, and whose theory that light could be described as tiny packets of energy (quanta) was crucial to the development of quantum theory. 

Even so, Einstein in this book becomes the conservative elder doubter who believes that classical physics — its ability to predict with utter precision how the world must operate — must not be undermined by a theory holding that at a certain level there is no precision or certainty.  Neils Bohr is the elder pontifical theorist, the philosophizing egoist, who eschews mathematical calculations for insights and enigmatic pronouncements couched in such difficult and obtuse language that few really understand them.  Heisenberg is the quiet genius whom many are suspicious of but whose insights and mathematical skills allow him to discover and understand the uncertainty principle.  Bohr and Heisenberg argue over the meaning and nature of uncertainty, and it is Bohr who finally provides the vocabulary through which the world has come to understand the principle. 

But it is Heisenberg who emerges from the book as the great genius and visionary.  Lindley describes the scientists in his narrative with great effect - he presents them as characters in a fascinating story, as human personalities, and the result is a deeper appreciation of the interests and issues that engaged them than discussions of the physical concepts alone would have allowed.

The great drama of this book comes in the description of the “insight” that leads Heisenberg to the understanding of uncertainty, and the months-long arguments and debates that he and Bohr held about the principle, debates that began in friendship but ended with a personal distance that never closed.  Moreover, Einstein made a number of attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to refute the uncertainty principle, but never succeeded.  To the end of his life he refused to accept it and increasingly spoke of it in terms that seemed almost theological. 

Article Author: Hugh Ruppersburg

Hugh Ruppersburg lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

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