A Venue for Discussions of Science, Philosophy and the Arts
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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