An anecdote from Metafilter user range, answering a question about the strong nuclear force and gravity and black holes and apparently freakish coincidences in quantum physics

One of the perks of studying undergrad physics at MIT was taking third-semester quantum mechanics from someone who had an honest-to-god Nobel Prize. He (who shall remain nameless) was doing a test prep session with the class one night and at one point got to an expression that looked like this:

… at which point he stares hard at the board, then looks at us (~50 senior physics majors). Then at the board. Then us. Then back to the board, where he (a little sheepishly) reduces it to:

When we all got done laughing he retaliated with:

“Look. Experimentally, we don’t know the value of this number [points at alpha] better than within 2 orders of magnitude, and nobody can think of a way to measure it any better. The difference between pi and 3 is 5%. The simpler expression is going to hold true enough for some time between 50 years and forever. So shut up.”

Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
2006 

My first job after getting my PhD was in 1979 at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. One of my main reasons for taking it was the hope of making contact with some living legacy of Einstein, who had died twenty-four years earlier. In this I was disappointed. There was no trace of his time there, apart from a bust of him in the library. No student or follower of Einstein could be found. Only a few people who had known him, like the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, were still there. 

My first week there, Dyson, very much the gentleman, came by and invited me to lunch. After inquiring about my work, he asked if there was anything he could do to make me more at home in Princeton. I had but one request. “Could you tell me what Einstein was really like?” I asked. Dyson replied, “I’m very sorry, but that’s one thing I can’t help you with.” Surprised, I insisted, “But you came here in 1947 and you were a colleague of his until he died in 1955.”

Dyson explained that he too had come to the institute hoping to get to know Einstein. So he went to Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, to make an appointment. The day before the appointment, he began to worry about not having anything specific to discuss with the great man, so he got from Ms. Dukas copies of Einstein’s recent scientific papers. They were all about Einstein’s efforts to construct a unified-field theory. Reading them that evening, Dyson decided they were junk. The next morning, he realized that although he couldn’t face Einstein and tell him his work was junk, he couldn’t not tell him either. So he skipped the appointment and, he told me, spent the ensuing eight years before Einstein’s death avoiding him. I could only say the obvious:

“Don’t you think Einstein could have defended himself and explained his motivation to you?”

Certainly, Dyson replied, but I was much older before that thought occurred to me.

p. 49-50

Paul K. Feyerabend, Quantum Theory and Our View of the World inside Physics and Our View of the World, edited by Jan Hilgevoord 

When I was a student in Vienna, in the late 1940s, we had three physicists who were known to a wider public: Karl Przibram, Felix Ehrenhaft and Hans Thirring. Przibram was an experimentalist, a pupil of J. J. Thomson whom he often mentioned with reverence. Philosophers of science know him as the editor of a correspondence on wave mechanics between Schrodinger, Lorentz, Planck and Einstein. He was the brother of Hans Przibram, the biologist, and, I believe, the uncle of the neurophysiologist Karl Przibram. He talked with a subdued voice and wrote tiny equations on the blackboard. Occasionally his lectures were interrupted by shouting, laughing and trampling from below; that was Ehrenhaft’s audience.

Ehrenhaft had been professor of theoretical and experimental physics in Vienna. He left when the Nazis came; he returned in 1947. By that time many physicists regarded him as a charlatan. He had produced and kept producing evidence for subelectrons, magnetic monopoles of mesoscopic size and magnetolysis, and he held that the inertial path was a spiral, not a geodesic. His attitude towards theory was identical with that of Lenard and Stark whom he often mentioned with approval. He challenged us to criticize him and laughed when he realized how strongly we believed in the excellence of say, Maxwell’s equations without having calculated and tested specific effects.

During a summer school in Alpbach he set up his experiments in a little farmhouse and invited everyone to have a look. Leon Rosenfeld was there; so was Maurice Pryce, one of the most abrasive physicists of his generation. They went in; when they reappeared they looked as if they had seen something obscene. However all they could say was ‘obviously a Dreckeffekt’. Afterwards, in Ehrenhaft’s lecture, Rosenfeld and Pryce sat in the front row. Having described his experiments Ehrenhaft went up to them and exclaimed: ‘Was können sie sagen mit allen ihren schönen Theorien? Nichts können sie sagen. Still müssen sie sein. Sitzen müssen sie bleiben.’ (What can they say with all their fine theories? They can say nothing. They must be silent. They must remain seated.) And, indeed, Rosenfeld and Pryce, so eloquent on other occasions, did not say a single word. Ehrenhaft may not have been mainstream. But he made us think — more than many mainstream scientists before and after him.

Paul K. Feyerabend, Has the Scientific View of the World a Special Status Compared With Other Views? inside Physics and Our View of the World, edited by Jan Hilgevoord 

Is it not really strange, asks Einstein, that human beings are normally deaf to the strongest argument while they are always inclined to overestimate measuring accuracies?

These and similar examples show that science contains different trends with different research philosophies. One trend requires that scientists stick closely to the facts, design experiments that clearly establish the one or the other of two conflicting alternatives and avoid far reaching speculations. One might call it the Aristotelian trend. Another trend encourages speculation and is ready to accept theories that are related to the facts in an indirect and highly complex way. Let us call this the Platonic trend. …

Using a symmetry principle Anaximander objected that fire, earth and air seemed to be as important as water which means that the basic substance had to be different from all elements, though capable of turning into them under special circumstances. Anaximander called it apeiron - the unlimited. Parmenides then pointed out that Being was still more fundamental (water is, fire is, apeiron is - they are all forms of Being). What can be said about Being? That it is and that not-Being is not. Note that the statement BEING IS (estin in the Greek of Parmenides) was the first explicit conservation principle of the West: it asserted the conservation of Being. Accepting this argument we can infer that there is no change: the only possible change is into not-Being, not-Being does not exist, hence there is no change. What about difference? The only possible difference is between Being and not-Being, not-Being does not exist, hence Being is everywhere the same. But don’t we perceive change and difference? Yes, we do, which shows that change and difference are appearances, chimeras. Reality does not change. This was the first and most radical (Western) theory of knowledge. It is not entirely ridiculous: nineteenth-century science up to and including Einstein also devalued change.

…

Ancient atomism can be seen as an attempt to shorten the distance between basic physics (BEING IS) and common sense. Leukippos and Democritos retained one part of Parmenides’ theory (atoms are tiny fragments of Parmenidean Being) and rejected another (not-Being exists and it is identical with space).

Love of Truth is one of the strongest motives for replacing what really happens by a streamlined account or, to express it in a less polite manner — love of truth is one of the strongest motives for deceiving oneself and others.

In 1854 Commander Perry, using force, opened the ports of Hakodate and Shimoda to American ships for supply and trade. This event demonstrated the military inferiority of Japan. The members of the Japanese enlightenment of the early 1870s, Fukuzawa among them, now reasoned as follows: Japan can keep its independence only if it becomes stronger. It can become stronger only with the help of science. It will use science effectively only if it does not just practice science but also believes in the underlying ideology. To many traditional Japanese this ideology - ‘the’ scientific world-view - was barbaric. But, so the followers of Fukuzawa argued, it was necessary to adopt barbaric ways, to regard them as advanced, to introduce the whole of Western civilization in order to survive.

The lesson I draw from this sequence of events is that a uniform ‘scientific view of the world’ may be useful for people doing science — it gives them motivation without tying them down. It is like a flag. Though presenting a single pattern it makes people do many different things. However, it is a disaster for outsiders (philosophers, fly-by-night mystics, prophets of a New Age, the ‘educated public’), who, being undisturbed by the complexities of research, are liable to fall for the most simple-minded and most vapid tale.

Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 

In the 1890s some of Germany’s leading physicists were obsessively pursuing a problem that had long vexed them: what was the relationship between the temperature, the range of colours, and the intensity of light emitted by a hot iron poker? It seemed a trivial problem compared to the mystery of X-rays and radioactivity that had physicists rushing to their laboratories and reaching for their notebooks. But for a nation forged only in 1871, the quest for the solution to the hot iron poker, or what became known as ‘the blackbody problem’, was intimately bound up with the need to give the German lighting industry a competitive edge against its British and American competitors. But try as they might, Germany’s finest physicists could not solve it. In 1896 they thought they had, only to find within a few short years that new experimental data proved that they had not. It was Max Planck who solved the blackbody problem, at a cost. The price was the quantum.

…

Driven largely by the abolition of internal tariffs after unification and French war compensation, by the outbreak of the First World War Germany’s industrial output and economic power would be second only to the United States. By then it was producing over two-thirds of continental Europe’s steel, half its coal, and was generating more electricity than Britain, France and Italy combined. Even the recession and anxiety that affected Europe after the stock market crash of 1873 only slowed the pace of German development for a few years.