Later he realized that some physicists rely almost exclusively on mathematical language to describe the reality of nature; any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility; it’s only pedagogical. I think this is largely true of [Paul] Dirac; I think that his invention is never initially verbal but initially algebraic.” By contrast, he realized that a physicist like Bohr “regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely, as a way to make himself intelligible to other people. . . . So there’s a very wide spectrum. [At Cambridge] I was simply learning and hadn’t learned very
...more
