Chapter 13
AWFUL BOHR INCANTATION TERMINOLOGY
F
or all its subsequent notoriety, the uncertainty principle’s arrival did not trigger instant unrest and rioting in the halls of physics and philosophy. Born, recognizing Schrödinger’s waves as representations of probability, had already said that determinism must go. Pauli and Dirac had seen that there was something strange about the way quantum physics manifested itself to the outside world. Heisenberg’s uncertainty pinned down that strangeness, put a number on it, and—perhaps most important to Heisenberg—dashed any lingering hope that Schrödinger with his waves could restore some sort of classical reality to physics. But this discussion, to the select few engaged in it, concerned the inner workings of quantum mechanics. It was Bohr, developing his new philosophy of complementarity, who grappled
