I distinctly recall reading a quote from somebody talking about the debates between Bohr and Einstein, in which Einstein invented ingenious thought experiments to measure two non-commuting observables (position and momentum, or energy and time) and Bohr poked holes in them. The comment was something along the lines of "Of course, Einstein was much smarter than Bohr, but Bohr won every argument because he had the advantage of being right."
Unfortunately, my google-fu is weak, and I can't turn up a source for this. It's too good a line to pass up, if it's a real quote, but I don't want to quote it in the book without attributing it to the proper source.
Does anybody recognize this and know where it came from? Anybody have any ideas of what might've planted this quote in my brain?
- Log in to post comments
Are you thinking of the bit in Einstein's second criticism in?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr-Einstein_debates
Hope this maybe at least jogs your memory.
Cheers!
I distinctly remember exactly the same quote. I'm guessing it is from one of the common quantum mechanics textbooks.
Sorry; I like to think a know a fair bit about the Bohr-Einstein debate, but your quotation doesn't ring a bell. There is an excited contemporary letter (fun to read) by Ehrenfest which recounts the debate (this can be found in many places, including Bohr's Collected Works), but your quotation isn't in there.
You might be interested to hear that current scholars think that the later part of the debate (i.e., post-1929) was misrepresented by Bohr in his influential 1949 paper (it seems that Bohr failed to understand Einstein's point back in 1930 and later, even though Ehrenfest emphasized in a letter to Bohr that Einstein's argument nad been misunderstood).
After 1929, Einstein didn't doubt the uncertainty relations. His worry was instead non-locality (as Don Howard has argued (pdf)); it was intended to be a version of the argument later presented in Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (1935). And here Einstein was right: QM really is non-local (though he was wrong to think that this would disprove the theory).
I have no idea either, but judging by the style the comment could be from Wolfgang Pauli. As a bonus I will make a wild ass guess about location: the 5th Solvay Conference (1927).
I think I remember the same quote (but not the person who said it). However, I'm pretty sure I remember where I read it. It was in the book The Tests of Time which is a collection of readings about several important physical theories. I think the quote was in the introduction to a piece by Niels Bohr on quantum theory. Unfortunately, I don't own the book and it's not in my current university's library.
I'd say it sounds more like Pais.
Maybe you thought it up yourself. since it has such a 'quotable quality' to it everyone thinks they've heard it somewhere before.
Maybe you thought it up yourself. since it has such a 'quotable quality' to it everyone thinks they've heard it somewhere before.
I'm a little afraid of that, which is why I asked.
I got The Tests of Time out of the library here, but if that line is in there, it didn't leap out at me right away. I have the book, though, and it looks to have a lot of interesting stuff in it, so I'll do a more thorough read and see what I find.