Thursday, May 22, 2008

Burn out?

Werner Karl Heisenberg
December 5th, 1901 to February 1st, 1976

One wonders if scientists achieve meteoric posture for a short time and them run out of energy and drop. Consider Werner Karl Heisenberg in the above photograph. That photograph was taken around 1926 [he would have been about 25]...about the same time that he declared his uncertainty principle that "...states that the simultaneous determination of two paired quantities, for example the position and momentum of a particle, has an unavoidable uncertainty." Look at Einstein...not much from him after the 1905 papers [he was about 26] and basically evaporated by the late 30's. He turned into an icon. Heisenberg became more administrative after the war. Maybe this is characteristic of all highly creative people.




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