Although Einstein himself took to the study of “matrix mechanics” as if it were a map to a buried treasure, there was something about the ideas of the young German physicist that he found truly repulsive. “Heisenberg’s theory is the most interesting of all recent contributions,” he wrote to his friend Michele Besseo, “a devilish calculation that incorporates infinite determinants and uses matrices instead of coordinates. It’s quite brilliant. And its cursed complexity insulates it from being easily disproven.” But what Einstein abhorred was not the formulae’s hermeticism, but something far
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