No posts for a while, as I’ll be at a chamber music camp for adult amateurs (or what a friend’s granddaughter calls — band camp for adults). In a week or two if you see a beat up old Honda Pilot heading west on the north shore of Lake Superior, honk and wave.
I expect the usual denizens to be there — mathematicians, physicists, computer programmers, MDs, touchy-feely types who are afraid of chemicals etc. etc. We all get along but occasionally the two cultures do clash, and a polymer chemist friend is driven to distraction by a gentle soul who is quite certain that “chemicals” are a very bad thing. For the most part, everyone gets along. Despite the very different mindsets, all of us became very interested in music early on, long before any academic or life choices were made.
So, are the analytic types soulless automatons producing mechanically perfect music which is emotionally dead? Are the touchy-feely types sloppy technically and histrionic musically? A double-blind study would be possible, but I think both groups play pretty much the same (less well than we’d all like, but with the same spirit and love of music).
A few years ago I had the pleasure of playing Beethoven with Heisenberg — along with an excellent violinist I’ve played with for years, the three of us read Beethoven’s second piano trio (Opus 1, #2) with Heisenberg’s son Jochem (who, interestingly enough, is a retired physics professor). He is an excellent cellist who knows the literature cold. The violinist and I later agreed that we have rarely played worse. Oh well. Heisenberg, of course, was a gentleman throughout.
Later that evening, several of us had the pleasure of discussing quantum mechanics with him. He didn’t disagree with my idea that the node in the 2S orbital (where no electron is ever found) despite finding the electron on either side of the node, forces us to give up the idea of electron trajectory (aromatic ring currents be damned). He pretty much seemed to agree with the Copenhagen interpretation — macroscopic concepts just don’t apply to the quantum world, and language trips us up.
One rather dark point about the Heisenberg came up in an excellent book about the various interpretations of what Quantum Mechanics actually means: “What Is Real?” by Adam Becker. I have no idea if the following summary is actually true, but here it is. Heisenberg was head of the German nuclear program to develop an atomic bomb. Nuclear fission was well known in Germany, having been discovered there. An old girl friend wrote a book about Lise Meitner, one of the discoverers and how she didn’t get the credit she was due.
At the end of the war there was an entire operation to capture German physicists who had worked on nuclear development (operation Alsos). Those captured (Heisenberg, Hahn, von Laue and others) were taken to Farm Hall, an English manor house which had been converted into a military intelligence center. It was supplied with chalkboards, sporting equipment, a radio, good food and secretly bugged to high heaven. The physicists were told that they were being held “at His Majesty’s pleasure.”. Later they told the American’s had dropped the atomic bomb. They didn’t believe it as their own work during the war led them to think it was impossible.
All their discussions were recorded, unknown to Heisenberg. It was clear that the Germans had no idea how to build a bomb even though they tried. However Heisenberg and von Weizsacker constructed a totally false narrative, that they had never tried to build a bomb, but rather a nuclear reactor. According to Becker, Heisenberg was never caught out on this because the Farm Hall transcripts were classified. It isn’t clear to me from reading Becker’s book, when they were UNclassified, but apparently Heisenberg got away with it until his death in 1978.
Amazing stuff if true
Chemiotics II 
Comments
According to the Wikipedia article on Farm Hall, “In February 1992 [the transcripts] were declassified and published.” My recollection is that Heisenberg, Jr. has continued to defend his father’s position, but I’m not sure that is still the case.
P.S. I play a different kind of music, and quite often I think I play badly. But one time, someone sent me a tape he made of a live performance, without telling me what it was. I listened to the guitar solo admiringly, and then he revealed that it was my band, the guitar player was me, and the recording was made at a place and time when I had thought I had played especially badly. There’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is, other than “Practice!”, but I already knew that.
Yes, the Farm Hall transcripts were published and discussed by Jeremy Bernstein in his book. When one of the physicists told Heisenberg that he suspected the British were secretly recording them, Heisenberg said that he thought the British were too gentlemanly to do something like that.
There are a lot of books that challenge the standard Copenhagen interpretation and support others like Bohmian mechanics. Becker’s book is a good one. Anil Ananthaswamy’s recent book about the double slit experiment is another. John Casti has a discussion of several alternative explanations in his classic book “Paradigms Lost”.