Subtle Is the Lord - Abraham Pais  ## Metadata - Author: **Abraham Pais** - Full Title: Subtle Is the Lord - Category: #books - Tags: #mathematic #physic ## Highlights - ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ (Location 46) - “The essential of the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not what he does or suffers”. (Location 72) - Einstein’s objections to quantum theory have not really stood the test of time—most notably that it was “unreasonable” that the theory should possess strange non-local aspects (puzzling features that Einstein correctly pointed out). Yet, his most fundamental criticism does, I believe, remain valid. This objection is that the theory seems not to present us with any fully objective picture of physical reality. Here, I would myself certainly side with Einstein (and with certain other key figures in the development of the theory, notably Schrödinger and Dirac) in the belief that quantum theory is not yet complete. (Location 133) - Were I asked for a one-sentence biography of Einstein, I would say, ‘He was the freest man I have ever known.’ (Location 167) - So began a series of discussions that continued until shortly before his death.* I would visit with him in his office or accompany him (often together with Kurt Gödel) on his lunchtime walk home. (Location 489) - It became clear to me from listening to them both that the advent of quantum mechanics in 1925 represented a far greater break with the past than had been the case with the coming of special relativity in 1905 or of general relativity in 1915. (Location 530) - ‘I have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about general relativity theory’ (Location 537) - But since c is of the order of one billion miles per hour, the equation also says that the classical answer can continue to be trusted for all velocities to which it was applied in early times. That is the correspondence principle of relativity, which is as old as relativity itself. The ancestors, from Galileo via Newton to Maxwell, could continue to rest in peace and glory. (Location 1102) - ‘What I found in the quantum domain are only occasional insights or fragments which were produced in the course of fruitless struggles with the grand problem. I am ashamed* to receive at this time such a great honor for this’. (Location 1142) - Einstein had started his solitary search for a theory of principle that would maintain classical causality in an orderly way and from which quantum mechanics should be derivable as a constructive theory. (Location 1154) - The existence of singularities associated with gravitational collapse is considered by some an indication for the incompleteness of the general relativistic equations. It is not known whether or not these singularities are smoothed out by quantum effects. (Location 1182) - Tags: #quantum - Einstein’s activities concerning the foundations of statistical mechanics preceded the appearance of the first papers in which it was noted that all was not well with Boltzmann’s ergodic hypothesis. (Location 1927) - It was stated that the entropy does not always, but rather almost always, increase. (Location 2150) - ‘Already soon after 1900, i.e., shortly after Planck’s trailblazing work, it became clear to me that neither mechanics nor thermodynamics could (except in limiting cases) claim exact validity’ (Location 2170) - During the years 1905 to 1920, Einstein stated_more than once his displeasure with the handling of probability by others. In 1905 he wrote, ‘The word probability is used in a sense that does not conform to its definition as given in the theory of probability. In particular, “cases of equal probability” are often hypothetically defined in instances where the theoretical pictures used are sufficiently definite to give a deduction rather than a hypothetical assertion’ (Location 2225) - Tags: #probability - His assertion that entropy increases almost always, rather than always, was indeed very hard to swallow for those who did not believe in molecular reality. (Location 2856) - Tags: #physic - Thus, in a purely mechanical world there could not be a before and an after as we have in our world: the tree could become a shoot and a seed again, the butterfly turn back into a caterpillar, and the old man into a child. No explanation is given by the mechanistic doctrine for the fact that this does not happen, nor can it be given because of the fundamental property of the mechanical equations. The actual irreversibility of natural phenomena thus proves the existence of processes that cannot be described by mechanical equations; and with this the verdict on scientific materialism is settled’ (Location 2865)