Chapter 11
I AM INCLINED TO GIVE UP DETERMINISM
G
öttingen produced matrix mechanics. Wave mechanics came from Zurich. Other voices chimed in from Copenhagen and Cambridge. From their Olympian perch in Berlin, meanwhile, Albert Einstein and Max Planck surveyed the scene. Einstein was a few years short of fifty, Planck almost seventy. Both were by now essentially conservative figures. As long as there was confusion over the apparently contradictory mathematical forms of quantum mechanics, and concomitant mystification about the physical import of the theory, both men could cling to the hope that something closer in spirit to classical thinking might yet emerge. One aspect of the confusion dissolved with surprising ease and rapidity. In the spring of 1926 Schrödinger found that wave mechanics and matrix mechanics were not fundamentally differ-
