Chapter 12
OUR WORDS DON’T FIT
A
s Heisenberg and Schrödinger, along with their allies and critics, tussled over the meaning of the physics they were creating, the forty-one-year-old Niels Bohr held on to his role as guide and guru. Increasingly, though, other physicists questioned his judgments and fretted over his opaque pronouncements. Schrödinger, recovering from his ordeal in Copenhagen, confessed to frustration in dealing with Bohr. “The conversation is almost immediately driven into philosophical questions,” he wrote to a friend. “Soon you no longer know whether you really take the position he is attacking, or whether you really must attack the position he is defending.” In September, Paul Dirac arrived in Copenhagen for a sixmonth visit. Of Bohr’s famously allusive way of lecturing, Dirac observed that audiences were “pretty well spellbound,” but as for
