Quantum Legacies: Dispatches From an Uncertain World

by David Kaiser

  ABBREVIATIONS

  FB

  Felix Bloch Papers. Collection number SC303, Stanford University Archives, Palo Alto, California.

  HAB

  Hans A. Bethe Papers. Collection number 14-22-976, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York.

  JAW

  John A. Wheeler Papers. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  KST

  Kip S. Thorne Papers. In Professor Thorne’s possession, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

  LIS

  Leonard I. Schiff Papers. Call number SC220, Stanford University Archives, Palo Alto, California.

  MIT-AR

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Physics, Annual Reports. Bound chronologically in Reports to the [Institute] President, call number T171.M4195, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives, Cambridge.

  PDP

  Princeton University Department of Physics records. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, New Jersey.

  RTB

  Raymond Thayer Birge Correspondence and Papers. Call number 73/79c, Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley. Letters written by Birge are filed chronologically. The items cited here are from boxes 39 and 40; explicit folder titles will not be cited. Letters written to Birge are cited with box and folder titles.

  VFW

  Victor F. Weisskopf Papers. Collection MC 572, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Handwritten notes between Paul Ehrenfest and Albert Einstein, 25 October 1927, document 10-168, in Einstein Archives, Princeton University.

  2. I quoted the exchange in David Kaiser, “Bringing the Human Actors Back on Stage: The Personal Context of the Einstein-Bohr Debate,” British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 129–52, on 146n89. Also quoted in Jagdish Mehra, The Solvay Conferences on Physics: Aspects of the Development of Physics since 1911 (Boston: Reidel, 1975), xvii, 152; and Martin Klein, “Einstein and the Development of Quantum Physics,” in Albert Einstein: A Centenary Volume, ed. Anthony French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 133–51, on 136.

  3. See esp. Guido Bacciagaluppi and Antony Valentini, Quantum Theory at the Crossroads: Reconsidering the 1927 Solvay Conference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  4. Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam, 2003), chap. 23; Paul Ehrenfest to Niels Bohr, May 1931 (“I have completely lost contact”), as quoted in Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 409. On Ehrenfest’s unsent letter (“enervated and torn,” “weary of life”) and suicide, see Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times, 409–11.

  5. Dominik Rauch et al., “Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars,” Physical Review Letters 121 (2018): 080403, https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05966.

  6. Samuel Goudsmit to Leonard Schiff, 2 September 1966, in LIS box 4, folder “Physical Review” (“neighborhood grocery store”); and Simon Pasternack to Leonard Schiff, 22 January 1958 and 27 June 1963, in LIS box 4, folder “Physical Review.” See also Goudsmit’s annual reports in Physical Review Annual Reports, Editorial Office of the American Physical Society, Ridge, NY.

  7. Samuel Goudsmit, 1956 Annual Report (“too bulky”), 1955 Annual Report (“‘six feet’ of The Physical Review”), and 1963 Annual Report (“psychological limit”), in Physical Review Annual Reports. See also W. B. Mann to Samuel Goudsmit, 11 January 1955 (“destruction of the printed word”), in box 79, folder 14, Henry A. Barton Papers, collection number AR20, Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; Leonard Loeb to Goudsmit, 19 April 1955, in RTB box 19, folder “Loeb, Leonard Benedict”; and Thomas Lauritsen to Goudsmit, 27 December 1968, in box 12, folder 14, Thomas Lauritsen Papers, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena. See also David Kaiser, “Booms, Busts, and the World of Ideas: Enrollment Pressures and the Challenge of Specialization,” Osiris 27 (2012): 276–302, on 291–93.

  Chapter 1

  A version of this essay originally appeared in London Review of Books 31 (26 February 2009): 21–22.

  1. Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); David Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1991); Mary Jo Nye, “Aristocratic Culture and the Pursuit of Science: The de Broglies in Modern France,” Isis 88 (1997): 397–421; Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Alexander Dorozynski, The Man They Wouldn’t Let Die (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966); Charles Enz, No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born (New York: Basic, 2005).

  2. On the development of quantum theory, see esp. Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); Olivier Darrigol, From c-Numbers to q-Numbers: The Classical Analogy in the History of Quantum Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On collections of letters, see, e.g., Thomas Kuhn, John Heilbron, Paul Forman, and Lini Allen, Sources for History of Quantum Physics (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967); K. Przibram, ed., Letters on Wave Mechanics, trans. Martin Klein (New York: Philosophical Library, 1967); Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Hedwig Born, The Born-Einstein Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Diana K. Buchwald et al., eds., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987–); and Wolfgang Pauli, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, ed. Karl von Meyenn, 4 vols. (New York: Springer, 1979–99). On the impact of the Solvay conferences in particular, see esp. Richard Staley, Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 10; and Guido Bacciagaluppi and Antony Valentini, Quantum Theory at the Crossroads: Reconsidering the 1927 Solvay Conference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  3. Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009). See also Helge Kragh, Dirac: A Scientific Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Most biographical details about Dirac in this essay may be found in Farmelo’s biography.

  4. Ralph Fowler to P. A. M. Dirac, September 1925, as quoted in Farmelo, Strangest Man, 83.

  5. Werner Heisenberg, “Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations,” in Sources of Quantum Mechanics, ed. B. L. van der Waerden (New York: Dover, 1968), 261–76, on 261. Originally published as “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 33 (1925): 879–93.

  6. Quoted in Arthur I. Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1984), 143.

  7. Tatsumi Aoyama, Toichiro Kinoshita, and Makiko Nio, “Revised and Improved Value of the QED Tenth-Order Electron Anomalous Magnetic Moment,” Physical Review D 97 (2018): 036001, https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.06060.

  8. Paul Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930), 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  9. See, e.g., Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005); Patricia McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (New York: Penguin, 2005); and Richard Polenberg, ed., In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). See also Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and David Kaiser, “The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during t
he Early Cold War,” Representations 90 (Spring 2005): 28–60.

  10. In addition to Farmelo, Strangest Man, see also Peter Galison, “The Suppressed Drawing: Paul Dirac’s Hidden Geometry,” Representations 72 (Autumn 2000): 145–66.

  11. Farmelo, Strangest Man, 89.

  12. Joshua Wolf Shenk, “Lincoln’s Great Depression,” Atlantic, October 2005; and Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

  13. Farmelo, Strangest Man, 425.

  14. See, e.g., Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” London Review of Books 28 (17 August 2006): 23–26; and Ian Hacking, Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Illnesses (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).

  15. See, e.g., Jerome Wakefield, “DSM-5: An Overview of Changes and Controversies,” Clinical Social Work Journal 41, no. 2 (June 2013): 139–54.

  Chapter 2

  A version of this essay originally appeared in Nautilus, 13 October 2016.

  1. See, e.g., the examples analyzed in Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, The Quantum Moment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), chap. 10.

  2. David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann, eds., Einstein on Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), chap. 9; and Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 249.

  3. Albrecht Folsing, Albert Einstein, trans. Ewald Osers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), chap. 35; and Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam, 2003), 412–21.

  4. Schrödinger to Einstein, 12 August 1933, as quoted in Moore, Schrödinger, 275 (see also 267–77).

  5. Einstein’s letters with Schrödinger are housed in Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and copies are available in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. The most cogent analysis of their 1935 exchange remains Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chap. 5. I also discuss some of these letters in David Kaiser, “Bringing the Human Actors Back on Stage: The Personal Context of the Einstein-Bohr Debate,” British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 129–52.

  6. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?,” Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80.

  7. Schrödinger to Einstein, 7 June 1935, and Einstein to Schrödinger, 17 June 1935, as quoted and translated in Fine, Shaky Game, 66, 68.

  8. Einstein to Schrödinger, 19 June 1935, as quoted and translated in Fine, Shaky Game, 69.

  9. Einstein to Schrödinger, 8 August 1935, as quoted and translated in Fine, Shaky Game, 78.

  10. Albert Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, 14 April 1933 (“firmly convinced”), reprinted in Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, 276; Einstein’s remarks on 3 October 1933 in Royal Albert Hall (“lightning flashes”), reprinted in Einstein on Politics, 278–81; Einstein to Stephen S. Wise, 6 June 1933 (“secretly re-arming”), reprinted in Einstein on Politics, 287–88; on renouncing pacifism, see Einstein on Politics, 282–87.

  11. Schrödinger to Einstein, 19 August 1935, and Einstein to Schrödinger, 4 September 1935, as quoted and translated in Fine, Shaky Game, 82–84.

  12. Erwin Schrödinger, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik,” Die Naturwissenschaften 23 (1935): 807–12, 823–28, 844–49, on 807. An English translation of Schrödinger’s essay is available in John Trimmer, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 323–38.

  13. Fine, Shaky Game, 80. See also “Dr. Arnold Berliner and Die Naturwissenschaften,” Nature 136 (1935): 506.

  14. Schrödinger’s diary, July 1933 (“I have already learnt enough”), as quoted in Moore, Schrödinger, 272; Max Laue to Fritz London, June 1934, as quoted in Moore, Schrödinger, 295; Schrödinger’s BBC address from May 1935 (“gallows and stake”), as quoted in Moore, Schrödinger, 301–2.

  15. Schrödinger to Bohr, 13 October 1935, as quoted in Moore, Schrödinger, 313.

  16. P. P. Ewald and Max Born, “Dr. Arnold Berliner,” Nature 150 (1942): 284–85.

  17. J. A. Formaggio, D. I. Kaiser, M. M. Murskyj, and T. E. Weiss, “Violation of the Leggett-Garg Inequality in Neutrino Oscillations,” Physical Review Letters 117 (2016): 050402, http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00041.

  Chapter 3

  A version of this essay originally appeared in Aeon, 20 July 2017.

  1. See, e.g., Frank Close, Neutrino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Joao Magueijo, A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age (New York: Basic, 2009).

  2. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), chaps. 14, 17–19; and Gino Segrè and Betinna Hoerlin, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age (New York: Holt, 2016), chaps. 18–20, 25–27.

  3. See esp. Catherine Westfall, Lillian Hoddeson, Paul Henriksen, and Roger Meade, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–45 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  4. Frederick Reines, “The Neutrino: From Poltergeist to Particle,” Nobel Lecture (1995), in Nobel Lectures, Physics, 1991–1995, ed. Gösta Ekspong (Singapore: World Scientific, 1997), 202–21.

  5. Reines, “Neutrino,” 204–5; and “The Reines-Cowan Experiments: Detecting the Poltergeist,” Los Alamos Science 25 (1997).

  6. Reines, “Neutrino”; and Close, Neutrino, chap. 3.

  7. Frank Close, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy (New York: Basic, 2015), chaps. 1–4. Most biographical details about Pontecorvo in this essay come from Close’s Half-Life.

  8. Simone Turchetti, The Pontecorvo Affair: A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Close, Half-Life. On nuclear patent disputes, see also Alex Wellerstein, “Patenting the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Intellectual Property, and Technological Control,” Isis 99 (2008): 57–87.

  9. On Fuchs’s wartime espionage, see Robert Williams, Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); and David Kaiser, “The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Early Cold War,” Representations 90 (Spring 2005): 28–60.

  10. Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, Soviet Atomic Espionage (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1951).

  11. Close, Half-Life, chap. 15.

  12. On the journal translations, see David Kaiser, “The Physics of Spin: Sputnik Politics and American Physicists in the 1950s,” Social Research 73 (Winter 2006): 1225–52.

  13. In addition to Close, Half-Life, see also Samoil Bilenky, “Bruno Pontecorvo and Neutrino Oscillations,” Advances in High Energy Physics, 2013, 873236. In his first work on neutrino oscillations, Pontecorvo hypothesized a superposition between a neutrino and an antineutrino; he later modified his model to describe a superposition of two (or more) neutrino flavors.

  14. See, e.g., Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?”; and Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  15. Close, Half-Life, chap. 17; and Bilenky, “Bruno Pontecorvo.”

  16. Johanna Miller, “Physics Nobel Prize Honors the Discovery of Neutrino Flavor Oscillations,” Physics Today 68 (December 2015): 16; and Emily Conover, “Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to Neutrino Experiments,” APS News, 9 November 2015, https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/updates/breakthrough.cfm.