What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

Some took him to be saying that consciousness itself causes the collapse of the wave function;

Stating that consciousness collapses wave functions does arguably solve the measurement problem but only at the price of introducing new problems. How could consciousness cause wave function collapse?

what is consciousness anyhow?

desperate move,

von Neumann may have also held the view that consciousness is responsible for wave function collapse.

“The boundary between the [observer and observed] is arbitrary to a very large extent,”

claimed that Bohr’s work supported this “dual description” of nature.

complementarity.

new developments in more practical branches of physics overtook concerns about the philosophical underpinnings of the field.

German physicist Otto Hahn had split the atom.

Bohr immediately tackled the problem. With the help of his former student John Wheeler, the father of quantum physics set about unveiling the mysteries of uranium.

Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, found that the two isotopes of uranium have very different nuclear properties.

guaranteed that nuclear power would be phenomenally difficult to achieve, requiring enormous quantities of uranium and city-sized industrial diffusion and centrifuge facilities. “It can never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge factory,” concluded Bohr.

where I found out about [fission]?

Eugene Wigner had jaundice.

Szilard, another Hungarian refugee physicist who had realized the enormous possibilities of a nuclear chain reaction

the theory of Bohr and Wheeler of course occupied us very much.…

enlisted a third: Edward Teller,

“Hungarian conspiracy”

recruited a fourth conspirator: Albert Einstein.

crafted a letter to pass along to FDR.

project stalled for over a year while Hitler occupied Denmark, captured Paris, and relentlessly bombed London.

Wigner met with Arthur Compton, an American physicist who was preparing a report for FDR’s Top Policy Group on the feasibility of developing atomic bombs.

assigned to General Leslie Groves,

Groves selected the Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the top-secret project, code-named Manhattan.

Fermi, Wigner, and other refugee European physicists joined their American colleagues at Los Alamos,

Germany had been the center of the physics world for generations,

Fission, after all, had been first discovered in Germany.

thanks to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, it had access to va...

Otto Hahn,

stayed in Germany,

Pascual Jordan, eagerly aided Hitler’s regime.

Jordan joined not only the Nazi Party in 1933, but also the Brownshirts, Hitler’s paramilitary storm troopers. And other

declaring relativity and quantum theory to be “Jewish physics.”

Heisenberg fell somewhere between the extremes of von Laue’s conscientious objection and Jordan’s full embrace of the Nazi philosophy.

Heisenberg

remained in Hitler’s Reich

simultaneously hiding behind the “apolitical” nature of science.

he left very little doubt about the depths of his loyalty to Germany,

chosen as one of the leaders of the German nuclear program.

brilliant theoretician [Heisenberg] was always very casual about numbers,”

crucial realization—

purified graphite could be used to moderate and control nuclear chain reactions—escaped the attention of Heisenberg

rare and expensive moderator, heavy water,

nuclear reactor held promise as a new power source for the Reich’s war engine.

Heisenberg was made the de facto head of the nuclear program in Germany,

Heisenberg “had agreed to sup with the devil,” wrote Peierls years later, “and perhaps he found that there was not a long enough spoon.”

He returned to his fission lab in Hechingen and made one last push to complete the reactor,

forced to flee from his research.

he was apprehended there by an American military task force,