Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [154]
Schrödinger did not have to leave Berlin, but did so as a matter of principle. He had been in exile at Magdalen College, Oxford University less than a week when, on 9 November 1933, he received some unexpected news. The president of the college, George Gordon, informed Schrödinger that The Times had called to say that he would be among the winners of the Nobel Prize that year. 'I think you may believe it. The Times do not say a thing unless they really know', said Gordon proudly.50 'As for me, I was truly astonished, for I thought you had the prize.'
Schrödinger and Dirac were each awarded a half share of the 1933 Nobel Prize, with the deferred prize of 1932 going to Heisenberg alone. Dirac's first reaction was to refuse it because he did not want the publicity. He accepted after Rutherford convinced him that refusing it would generate even greater publicity. While Dirac toyed with the idea of rejecting the prize, Born was deeply hurt at being ignored by the Swedish Academy.
'I have a bad conscience regarding Schrödinger, Dirac, and Born', Heisenberg wrote to Bohr.51 'Schrödinger and Dirac both deserved an entire prize at least as much as I do, and I would have gladly shared with Born, since we have worked together.' Earlier he replied to a letter of congratulations from Born: 'The fact that I am to receive the Nobel Prize alone, for work done in Göttingen in collaboration – you, Jordan and I – this fact depresses me and I hardly know what to write to you.'52 'That Heisenberg's matrices bear his name is not altogether justified, as in those days he actually had no idea what a matrix was', Born complained to Einstein two decades later.53 'It was he who reaped all the rewards of our work together, such as the Nobel Prize and that sort of thing.' He admitted that 'for the last twenty years I have not been able to rid myself of a certain sense of injustice'. Born was finally awarded the Nobel in 1954 for 'his fundamental work in quantum mechanics and especially for his statistical interpretation of the wave function'.
After the difficult start, by the end of November 1933 Princeton was beginning to appeal to Einstein. 'Princeton is a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts', he wrote to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium. 'Yet, by ignoring certain special conventions, I have been able to create for myself an atmosphere conducive to study and free from distractions.'54 In April 1934 Einstein made public that he would be staying in Princeton indefinitely. The 'bird of passage' had found a place to nest for the rest of his life.
Einstein had always been an outsider, even in physics, beginning with his days in the Patent Office. Yet he had led the way for so long and so often. He hoped to do so again as he came up with a new challenge for Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation.
Chapter 13
QUANTUM REALITY
'Princeton is a madhouse' and 'Einstein is completely cuckoo', wrote Robert Oppenheimer.1 It was January 1935 and America's leading home-grown theoretical physicist was 31. Twelve years later, after directing the building of the atomic bomb, he would return to the Institute for Advanced Study to take charge of the 'madhouse' and its 'solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation'.2 Einstein accepted that his critical attitude towards quantum mechanics ensured that 'here in Princeton I am considered an old fool'.3
It was a sentiment widely shared by the younger generation of physicists who, having been weaned on the theory, agreed with Paul Dirac's assessment that quantum mechanics explained 'most of physics and all of chemistry'.4 That a few old men were fighting about the meaning of the theory was, for them, neither here nor there, given its enormous practical success. By the end of the 1920s, as one problem after another in atomic physics was solved, attention shifted from the atom to the nucleus.