Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (story read aloud txt) 📕

The atom is the building block of everything. How does it work? How do the electrons move inside it? The scientists of the beginning of the century had been pondering these questions for more than a decade, without getting anywhere.

Like a Renaissance master painter in his studio, Bohr had gathered around him in Copenhagen the very best young physicists he could find, to work together on the mysteries of the atom. Among them was the brilliant Wolfgang Pauli—Heisenberg’s extremely intelligent, pretty arrogant friend and former classmate. But Pauli had recommended Heisenberg to the great Bohr, saying that to make any real progress, he was needed. Bohr had taken the advice, and in the autumn of 1924 had brought Heisenberg to Copenhagen from Göttingen, where he was working as an assistant to the physicist Max Born. Heisenberg had spent a few months in long discussions with Bohr, in Copenhagen, in front of blackboards covered with formulas. The young apprentice and the master had taken long walks together in the mountains, talking about the enigmas of the atom; about physics and philosophy.2

Heisenberg had steeped himself in the problem. It had become his obsession. Like the others, he had tried everything. Nothing worked. There seemed to be no reasonable force capable of guiding the electrons on Bohr’s strange orbits, and in his peculiar leaps. And yet those orbits and those leaps really did lead to good predictions of atomic phenomena. Confusion.

Desperation pushes us to look for extreme solutions. On that island in the North Sea, in complete solitude, Heisenberg resolved to explore radical ideas.

It was with radical ideas, after all, that twenty years earlier Einstein had astonished the world. Einstein’s radicalism had worked. Pauli and Heisenberg were enamored of his physics. Einstein for them was a legend. Had the time perhaps come, they asked themselves, to hazard as radical a step, to escape from the impasse regarding electrons in atoms? Could they be the ones to take it? In your twenties, you can dream freely.

Einstein had shown that even our most rooted convictions can be wrong. What seems most obvious to us now might turn out not to be correct. Abandoning assumptions that seem self-evident can lead to greater understanding. Einstein had taught that everything should be based on what we see, not on what we assume to exist.

Pauli repeated these ideas to Heisenberg. The two young men had drunk deep of this poisoned honey. They had been following the discussions on the relation between reality and experience that ran through Austrian and German philosophy at the beginning of the century. Ernst Mach, who had exerted a decisive influence on Einstein, insisted that knowledge had to be based solely on observations, freed of any implicit “metaphysical” assumption. These were the ingredients coming together in the young Heisenberg’s thinking, like the chemical components of an explosive, as he isolated himself on Helgoland in the summer of 1925.

And here he had the idea. An idea that could only be had with the unfettered radicalism of the young. The idea that would transform physics in its entirety—together with the whole of science and our very conception of the world. An idea, I believe, that humanity has not yet fully absorbed.

Heisenberg’s leap is as daring as it is simple. No one has been able to find the force capable of causing the bizarre behavior of electrons? Fine, let’s stop searching for this new force. Let’s use instead the force we are familiar with: the electric force that binds the electron to the nucleus. We cannot find new laws of motion to account for Bohr’s orbits and his “leaps”? Fine, let’s stick with the laws of motion that we’re familiar with, without altering them.

Let’s change, instead, our way of thinking about the electron. Let’s give up describing its movement. Let’s describe only what we can observe: the light it emits. Let’s base everything on quantities that are observable. This is the idea.

Heisenberg attempts to recalculate the behavior of the electron using quantities we observe: the frequency and amplitude of emitted light.

We can observe the effects of the electron’s leaps from one of Bohr’s orbits to another. Heisenberg replaces the physical variables (numbers) with tables of numbers that have the orbits of departure in their rows and the orbits of arrival in their columns. Each entry of the table stands in a row and in a column: it describes the leap from one orbit to another. He spends his time on the island trying to use these tables to calculate something that could justify Bohr’s rules. He doesn’t get much sleep. But he fails to do the math for the electron in the atom: too difficult. He tries to account for a simpler system instead, choosing a pendulum, and looks for Bohr’s rules in this simpler case.

On June 7, something begins to click:

When the first terms seemed to come right [giving Bohr’s rules], I became excited, making one mathematical error after another. As a consequence, it was around three o’clock in the morning when the result of my calculations lay before me. It was correct in all terms.

Suddenly I no longer had any doubts about the consistency of the new “quantum” mechanics that my calculation described.

At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that I had gone beyond the surface of things and was beginning to see a strangely beautiful interior, and felt dizzy at the thought that now I had to investigate this wealth of mathematical structures that Nature had so generously spread out before me.

It takes our breath away. Beyond the surface of things, “a strangely beautiful interior.” Heisenberg’s words resonate with those written by Galileo on first seeing the mathematical regularity appear in his measurements of the fall of objects along an inclined plane: the first mathematical law describing the motion of objects on Earth ever discovered by humankind. Nothing is like the emotion of seeing a mathematical law behind the disorder