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The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years.
In July 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger travelled to Munich to present one of the strangest and most powerful equations that the human mind has ever created.
Their two theories could not have been more opposed; while Schrödinger had needed only a single equation to describe virtually the whole of modern chemistry and physics, Heisenberg’s ideas and formulae were exceptionally abstract, philosophically revolutionary, and so dreadfully complex that only a handful of physicists understood how to use them, and even they suffered headaches trying to solve the simplest problems.
His matrices were all consistent: Heisenberg had modelled a quantum system based wholly on direct observation. He had replaced metaphors with numbers and discovered the rules governing the inner phenomena of atoms. His matrices allowed him to describe the location of an electron from one moment to the next, and how it would interact with other particles. He had replicated in the subatomic world what Newton had done for the solar system, using only pure mathematics, with no recourse to imagery.
His answer arrived two days later, and meant the immediate consecration of de Broglie, whose work Einstein saw as the beginning of a new way forward for physics: “He has lifted a corner of the great veil. This is the first weak beam of light to penetrate the dilemma of the quantum world, the most terrible of our generation.”
He devoured the writings of Schopenhauer, through whom he came to know the philosophy of Vedanta, and he learned that the horrified eyes of the mutilated horse in the square were also the eyes of the policeman mourning its death; that the teeth that bit into the raw meat
were the same that had champed at the grass in the hillside pastures, and that when the women had torn the immense heart from the animal’s chest with their hands, it was their own blood that slathered their faces, because every individual manifestation is only a reflection of Brahman, the absolute reality that underlies the phenomena of the world.
A particle could cross space in many ways, but from among them it chose only one. How? Through pure chance.
Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.
The proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation concluded their lecture with a peremptory verdict: “We consider quantum mechanics to be a closed theory. Its underlying physics and mathematics are no longer amenable to modification.” This was more than Einstein could bear. The iconoclast physicist par excellence refused to accept such a radical change. That physics should cease to speak of an objective world was not only a change in its point of view—it was a betrayal of the very spirit of science. For Einstein, physics must speak of causes and effects, and not only of probabilities. He refused
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Every morning at breakfast—mirroring the official debates—Einstein would proffer his riddles, and every night Bohr would arrive with a solution. The duel between the two men dominated the conference, and divided the physicists into two opposing camps, but, in the end, Einstein had to yield. He had not found a single inconsistency in Bohr’s reasoning. He accepted defeat grudgingly, and condensed all his hatred of quantum mechanics in a phrase he would repeat time and again in the succeeding years, one he practically spat in the Dane’s face before his departure: “God does not play dice with the
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