Edward Teller - Drinking tea with Niels Bohr (32/147)

To listen to more of Edward Teller’s stories, go to the playlist: 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.