Ultimately, to judge the guilt or rectitude of another’s choices is not to know the secrets of that person’s heart; it is to consider what I would have done, what I should have done, had I been in that person’s shoes. Indeed, to judge another person is to raise for oneself the question of the path not taken. It is to imagine another life and compare it with one’s own. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the existential burden of one who is free to choose, and to regret those choices. As he sat down to write his obituary, Samuel Goudsmit couldn’t know how Werner Heisenberg judged his own
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