Edward Teller - Drinking tea with Niels Bohr (32/147)
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- čas přidán 26. 09. 2017
- To listen to more of Edward Teller’s stories, go to the playlist: • Edward Teller (Scientist)
Hungarian-American physicist, Edward Teller (1908-2003), helped to develop the atomic bomb and provided the theoretical framework for the hydrogen bomb. He remained a staunch advocate of nuclear power, calling for the development of advanced thermonuclear weapons. [Listener: John H. Nuckolls]
TRANSCRIPT: Now, I want to tell you about an experience, or a few experiences with another of the great men of that age, perhaps greater than Einstein if one should apply any measure in these things, I mean Niels Bohr. He was Heisenberg's teacher and on the strong recommendation of Heisenberg, I went, in one of the vacation periods, to visit Copenhagen and I was sat down at the, the first tea party right next to Bohr. And with all of my twenty-one or twenty-two years, I was foolish enough to give something of a lecture to Niels Bohr, really not a statement of facts, a statement of hopes. I said- What we are doing here, quantum mechanics, we develop and in the future, classical physics, which is obviously full of contradictions between we- waves and particles, will no longer be taught. People will learn Schrödinger's equations, probability distributions, all the consistent things that we know. I went on for a little while but I had increasing the feeling that with Bohr I was a little less than a full success. In fact, as I was talking, his eye got closed and I tried to end my statement as soon as I could. I ended it. And there sits Bohr not saying a word, for an eternity, I think it lasted for half a minute. And then he said- Yes, yes. You might just as well say that we are not sitting here and drinking tea but that we are dreaming all of this. A good friend of mine about whom I might tell you a little more later, Weizsäcker, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, was sitting at that table. We stayed together in the same pension. I asked him- What did Bohr mean? He couldn't tell me either. I was obviously worried. I- after all, all I did is to say- now we have the truth. The truth announced by Bohr. And Bohr didn't like it. I can't quite assert that I understand now what he was thinking but I have something of a guess. Bohr liked paradoxes. I wanted to eliminate contradictions. He liked those contradictions. And what I said so far is true, what I am now going to tell you is probably true. And Bohr liked contradictions with good reason. He thought - he told some of us so later, in a more or less complicated manner, but with a clear theme song - the simple, straightforward way, how we see the world, this is a chair, this is a ring. It is a not a wave function, it is something that I can describe and understand. If I don't start from such ideas, then I can't possibly know what I am talking about. You must start from practical theory with all the contradictions that a detailed observation then lead to. Then, as a next step, you resolve these contradictions. But what I tried to tell him then; in the future the children will be raised in the world free of contradictions- No sir, we are not drinking tea, we are just dreaming all of this. - Věda a technologie
![Bohr Model: A Delightful History [CC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8IIg4Qt_qv4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Bohr Model: A Delightful History [CC]](/img/tr.png)
Teller thought about Bohr's single sentence answer for decades until he believed he might have finally unraveled Bohr's meaning. This shows Teller's incredible persistence in his need to understand. Amazing.
I think he likes story telling and a bit of dramatization, and he tends to be humble when praising others.
A giant of physics talking about another giant. How lucky we are to have such videos.
what a beautiful story, Bravo !!!
Very well said.
Great man
I love Teller's stories about the history of physics. This is where physicists become metaphysicists.
When people like Teller compare others with Einstein, better pay attention
Amazing.
"Bohr liked paradoxes. I wanted to try and eliminate contradictions. He liked those contradictions and...Bohr liked contradictions with good reason. He thought...the simple straightforward way of how we see the world: this is a chair, this is a ring....is not a wave function, it is something I can describe and if i dont start from such ideas, i can't possibly know what i am talking about. You must start from classical theory, with all the contradictions...then in the next step, you resolve these contradictions."
Indeed so, there is the lack of explanation of physical reality (it is still a mystery, like it or not) in QM, but that does not negate the reality we experience and that must be rooted in classical theory. After all, the chair that you sit in must be real or you will end up with a sore back as your posterior hits the solid floor beneath. The pain you will feel will indeed be real. That is why you avoid it.
@@D800Lover I think in short, he meant that we need to understand the deterministic in order to understand the probabilistic, and thus we may come to the conclusion that reality isn’t deterministic at all, it is just probabilistic with extremely high “precision”.
@@aaronnorman9755 Hi Aaron, I agree that we may not know what _physical_ reality is, but that does not mean physical reality doesn't exist. My experiences are still real, I pound a table that is still real and I observe things that are very real to me. But I only have these things, experiences, because I have a consciousness and somehow what is real is associated in some way with the consciousness we possess. This causes the wavefunction to collapse in the double-slit experiment when a conscious person observes it. This is why it is so spooky to many, indeed why QM is disliked by so many scientists. Like Einstein _"I'd like to think the Moon is there even when I am not looking at it."_
I have an even more disliked theory and it goes like this: The problem is solved when we accept that there is a _universal consciousness_ that is always looking. This idea is rather unnerving to even more. You see, the most spooky thing to talk about in science is _God._
@@D800Lover you are absolutely right, reality should be well, reality, but reality seems to play some sort of spooky game with us, that makes it very hard to understand how matter is made up,
Perhaps all our questions will be answered, if we understand how the probabilistic becomes deterministic. If you think about it we humans technically do have a wave function, and we certainly don’t seem to be moving very fast to where we form a probability cloud. My point is, perhaps there is some sort of barrier preventing probabilistic particles from forming matter, and when that “barrier” is passed everything comes to life?
-Again please forgive any inaccurate statements I may state, I am a computer engineering major, I’m only here out of pure interest, I’m not exactly a physicist.
one can say Newtonian physics AND quantum mechanics are 2 "eyes" with which we observe reality ...2 perspectives that offer a "parallax"... between the 2 inputs, we can get a "practical" dataset
to me, it's always seemed that "true" perception of reality is most certainly beyond the capabilities of our minds.
History is in favour of Bohr and his thinking. Time will tell.
Bohr was telling Teller, subtly, that there’s different levels of reality, and them sitting there was the classical/macro level and to think you can use quantum mechanics to describe classical interactions is nonsensical, like imaging life is a dream.
Or that "life is a dream" is the ultimate truth, but you're wasting your time telling people that because they won't believe you, especially because it's not useful to them in any way.
Teller "... and in the future ...." {Bohr passes out.... eyes close}... {Bohr wakes up} ... Yes yes, you might just as well say that we are not sitting here drinking tea, that we are dreaming all of this.
As a Dane, I knew Bohr personally and he told me about this conversation. Fax Teller!
bohr must be national treasure for danes
@@sldw3221he truly is
Great
A glimmer of Western science on the cusp of understanding reality. Buddhism is essentially about this. Neuroscience has almost caught up. Some quantum physicists got it. Pyrrho the elder got it, but perhaps in part because he met the Gymnosophists in India and the Magi in Persia when travelling with Alexander on his Indian campaign:
"The things themselves are equally indifferent, and unstable, and indeterminate, and therefore neither our senses nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason then we must not trust them, but be without opinions, and without bias, and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not."
Quite a mind he had.
Indeed.
Or Teller could have asked " Niels, what do you mean by that?"
Mr Teller can really weave a story and resolve it when done.
Imagine if Niels Bohr just said some random sentence because he zoned out completely when Teller was lecturing him and Teller, biased due to Bohr’s intelligence, thought an off the cuff throwaway line had a deeper philosophical meaning 😂😂😂
His accent never diminished after all the years living in the US.
He mostly just talked to Hungarians and other immigrants ☝️ not a bunch of rednecks from the BFE
Without perhaps, there's no equal to Niels Bohr and Marie Curie... A man who dared to dream and a woman who dared to die... Unquenchable.
Marie Curie is tragically overvalued + her callousness got many other people killed.
reminds me of zhuangzhi's butterfly dream
He thought you were so Bohring bro!
The Master sits with the student...
Paradoxes, I like too...!
My favorite Martian.
Great scientist in his own class
Because morally decent scientists left the room
One had to be careful not to bore Bohr.
Father of hydrogen bomb - Edward teller
Bohr was saying at the bottom level we may be a simulation?
He said that what we describe as 'real' (sensed through our experiences) cannot be described as real. That is a very profound thing to say. We really don't know to this day what physical reality is. We only know that it must exist in some form or other, but there may never be an answer to 'what is reality?'
Bohr thinking beyond everything, atom to next particle and to the next. He was quantum mechanics theorists. There are some local rumours Niels Bohr didn't like his founding of atomic moving particles, because he knows something will use that in wrong way, too much energy can be weaponized.
What about Oppenheimer?
Teller is looking at me and not looking at me simultaneously.
😂😂😅😂😂
Sounds like Bohr was an idealist rather than materialist.
What the hell do I care if the particles in my body wiggle by an Ångström if my hair is off by 3 inches ??
Yes!
Crazy
Who doesn’t teller know
Edward Teller was a talented physicist, but he was also a self-absorbed backstabber by unnecessarily testifying against J. Robert Oppenheimer when Hans Bethe had urged him not too.
Is general relativity, classical physics?
@David_7171: Yes, it's a generalization of Newtonian mechanics
Yes, mono-dualistic continuous connection is inherently ambiguous, the images of real-time relative-timing sum-of-all-histories are composed of superimposed potential motion positioning, like the solid phase of liquid possibilities, imaginary dreams.
Brings to mind how a great many 'modern Buddhists' dismiss whole swathes of His teachings in the original Pali Texts, and the vast commentarial literature, because they are unable to distinguish between His speaking of conceptual reality and ultimate reality. The former is not 'wrong', merely reality in another dimension, which cannot be dispensed with. The result is, of course, an only superficial and often wrong understanding of His teachings.
🇩🇰🇩🇰🇩🇰🇩🇰
Many years ago I could see through things and I observed patterns or resonance threw out matter, these things are not normally visible, the reality is resonance is threw out atomic structure.
I don't think Teller got it. Bohr seemed to believe we are not living in base reality.
Exactly. I think Bohr was saying something like:
You might as well teach them only QM as tell them this is all a dream. Even though it is ‘true’, they will not believe you because:
• It is unintuitive - not matching our daily reality
• Not useful to them
• Not something that people want to hear, it is extremely uncomfortable.
fazher of ze atomic bombh but not ze oun schildren! i zinkh bohr iz razher borink!
I too always say theoretical physicists don't know what they're talking about.
joe rogan
Surely without a doubt, Einstein is much greater than Bohr either in physics or in mathematics.
Because your opinion has the same weight as Teller’s.
Please, point out one mathematical publication due to Einstein or even another one due to Neils Bohr. After that we would be able to measure the merit of your statement.
"It is most remarkable that such a mind should exist at all." Albert Einstein In a letter that was archived after his death about Niels Bohr.
You need to really look more closely at the relationship between Einstein and Bohr.
"Without knowing much about Bohr's mental furniture or his remarkable ways of arranging it, Einstein understood that Bohr's genius was altogether unique.
Two letters published in the last volume of the Einstein Papers edited by Diana Buchwald and her colleagues at Caltech illustrate the point. In one letter Einstein discourages the correspondent from disturbing Bohr with a question, that Bohr was then overworked from planning his institute for theoretical physics in Copenhagen and from thinking in general. Einstein counseled the physicists to do everything they could to protect the great asset that was Bohr's mind." Dr. John Heilbron (University of California, Berkeley and Oxford University)
"Two men tower above all other 20th-century physicists. One was lucid, quotable, persuasive and peripatetic; the other, complex, obscure, misunderstood, living and working almost entirely in the land of his birth. One was Einstein. The other was Bohr. While almost everyone has heard of Albert Einstein, few outside the halls of science have heard of Niels Bohr. Yet if we owe our understanding of the Universe in the large to the insight of Einstein, it was Bohr who first untangled the complexities of microscopic matter and wove them into a coherent pattern that revealed the true depths of meaning within the inner space of the atom and its nucleus." John Barrow
"No phenomenon in the Universe has ever been observed which fails to obey the predictions of the quantum mechanics that Bohr established. But this success story was hardwon. Unraveling the mystery of the quantum interpretation of matter involved one of the greatest shifts in thinking that scientists have ever had to come to terms with. The story of how this new perspective emerged and transmogrified the physicists’ world view is at once the story of physics in the first half of the 20th century and the story of Niels Bohr." Abraham Pais
"There is these days much loose journalistic talk about ‘new Einsteins’ but if Pais’s biographies of Einstein and Bohr teach us anything, it is that in achievement and insight no living physicist comes within light years of these two stars in the firmament of 20th-century physics." John Barrow
To be fair though, Einstein wasn't as very good at advanced Mathematics. His Relativity paper was elaborated upon by an erstwhile Professor of his, building the mathematical spacetime model.
@@vinayseth1114 - Both Einstein and Bohr knew of the importance of mathematics, but they were not mathematicians as such and had help from other physicists that were. Einstein and Bohr were visionaries in the sense that they could "see" things with their minds before even mathematics entered the picture. Often that came later and was also incredibly important. They were those who were able to point the way, that is what made them what they were and why other physicists would then take note and act upon it. That is what made them such a rare species.
Not a good dude.
Teller is the least liked of all these guys .... and rightfully so.
Teller's view of the relative stature of Einstein and Bohr is totally ridiculous.
What do you mean ridiculous?
@@CazoDK Laughingly unreasonable. Einstein is one of the greatest scientists in history whereas Bohr is a pernicious mystifier.
Of course Einstein is one of the greatest scientists, but he was also a great opponent of quantum mechanics, which Bohr was not. Bohr has seen to multiple times have proven Einstein wrong, and if it weren't for Bohr's contributions to QM and Einstein's GR, you wouldn't be able to write such a narrow minded comment about another one of the greatest scientists in history. I suppose you think you're one of those brilliant people who knows a lot about physics and what's good and what's not, but the fact is that when people like Edward Teller says this about Bohr, one can only assume he is not ridiculous, unless one of course is near the same level of intelligence.
@@CazoDK Bohr contributed very little to QM. Other than his planetary model of the hydrogen atom, his greatest influence was in attaching himself to the founders of the theory and inserting his preconceived philosophical programme into their thinking on the theory. You are simply deluded if you think Bohr has made any *scientific* contribution as great as Einstein's GR. Lastly, Einstein was right to object to QM to the extent that it was identified with the Copenhagen interpretation, which it was back then. The absurdities he pointed out are not, indeed, flaws in the theory, but they are flaws in the Copenhagen interpretation.
@@ryam4632 I just counted seven mistakes in just one CZcams post, you have just broken all records. To set the record straight on just a couple of them, QM is the most successful scientific theory of all time. Nothing even comes close. Would you please enlighten us on the flaws of the Copenhagen Interpretation? You would have a Nobel Prize waiting for you, since it still stands. It may yet be replaced, but we haven't gotten there yet. Not a single prediction of QM has failed so far.
I get there is a cult of Einstein out there. In the end, even Einstein tired of it. Bohr couldn't have cared less for any cult, period!
Next time, please try to be more balanced, and maybe make an effort to understand that which you comment on. I can suggest some reading for you, that could help you towards a more balanced view. In the meantime, consider that solid-state technology, like computers, tablets, smart phones, lasers and more. The screen you are looking at right now is giving off light that is caused by Quantum Leaps discovered by Bohr. So we would all be electronically blind if it was not for Bohr. Maybe you owe him a LOT more than you think?