Uncertainty Poem by gershon hepner

Uncertainty



Lack of knowledge is no guarantee
of intellectual success,
but it is helpful for a man to see
no rules that he must not transgress.

About uncertainty uncertain, we
should not be certain about rules,
for only when they're broken are we free
to join them with our doubts as tools.


Janet Maslin reviews David Lindley's 'Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Sould of Science' (Doubleday) (NY Times, February 12,2007) :

Mr. Lindley’s clear explanations brings to mind one great scientist’s remark, cited here, that any physicist worth his salt ought to be able to explain his research to a barmaid. By contrast, Mr. Lindley says, Niels Bohr had trouble making even other physicists understand what he meant. One of this author’s better ideas is to translate passages of typically vague and bewildering Bohrian prose.In a book that is wisely short-winded, Mr. Lindley also analyzes tensions among the important theorists and innovators in these fields. And when his book’s subtitle calls this friction a “struggle for the soul of science, ” it is not being excessive. “Uncertainty” examines the critical juncture at which classical scientific methods became obsolete and the most radical theories began to be outside the realm of proof. He explains how “a gap had opened up between what a theory said was the full and correct picture of the physical world and what an experiment could in practice reveal of that world.” This was a schism so deep and troubling that it meant two fundamentally different ways of approaching science. At some point the debate became a battle of personalities as well as of scientific principles. And while Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and their colleagues were not prone to conventional catfights, they did have claws. As Pauli once said to Heisenberg, the irreverent young physicist who made waves in more ways than one: “It’s much easier to find one’s way if one isn’t too familiar with the magnificent unity of classical physics. You have a decided advantage there, but then lack of knowledge is no guarantee of success.”

2/12/07

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