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

by Adam Becker

As Schrödinger soon discovered, matrix mechanics and wave mechanics were mathematically equivalent, using different tools to describe the same ideas: a single new theory of quantum mechanics. Problems like the brightness of spectral lines had been solved first with wave mechanics only because Schrödinger’s equation was mathematically easier to handle than Heisenberg’s matrices in most situations. But the two versions of quantum mechanics still differed radically in their interpretation. Schrödinger was sure that he could find a way to interpret all quantum phenomena as the smooth movement of the waves his equation described. Heisenberg was unconvinced. “The more I think about the physical portion of the Schrödinger theory, the more repulsive I find it,” he wrote to Pauli. “What Schrödinger writes about the visualizability of his theory is ‘probably not quite right,’ in other words it’s crap.”