Prof. Ernst Peter Fischer as a guest of the Literary Society challenges the intellectual flexibility of his audience.
AUTHOR: N.N.
MUNICH MERKUR FROM MARCH, 08, 2024
GRÄFELFING (MM) - In the search for the innermost parts of the world, in the end you will only discover yourself, predicted Prof. Dr. Ernst Peter Fischer. The physicist, biologist and economic historian opened up an extraordinary look at the world of quantum mechanics to his audience on Wednesday evening in the auditorium of the Kurt-Huber-Gymnasium (KHG). The Gräfelfing Literary Society invited the people to this lecture.
“The hour of the physicists” is the name of the current book by Prof. Dr. Ernst Peter Fischer. At the invitation of the Literary Society, he invited the Gräfelfinger audience to a challenging excursion into the world of quantum mechanics.
PHOTO: DAGMAR RUTT
The guide was Fischer's recent publication of his new book The Hour of the Physicists. Well-versed, rich in anecdotes and vividly, Fischer reports on the great decade of physics between 1922 and 1932 and the brilliant protagonists of this time. He also described the consequences that the completely new theory of atoms and matter would bring with it. Quantum mechanics is now a mainstay of modern physics. As a physical theory that has been confirmed experimentally today, it describes the laws of states and processes of matter. Without them, there would be no iPhones today, said Fischer, who taught at the universities of Konstanz and Heidelberg. The fact that the development of the cell phone, like our modern world in general, is down to an imaginary number is downright crazy. This imaginary unit i is a so-called non-real number with the property i squared = -1.
In his book, Prof. Fischer goes his own way. He told his listeners that he tried to understand natural science as a spiritual science and advocated a romantic view of the world. “Romantic thinking assumes that alongside the visible there is the invisible on an equal footing,” he explained. Similarly, in quantum physics, the real takes a back seat to the possible, the potential is more real than the concrete, and atoms remain indeterminate, until they were measured.
One of the pioneers of the new way of thinking was the scientist and Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900-1958). Fischer quoted him as follows: “Natural science, which is no longer classical, is for the first time a theory of becoming.” Fischer explains it as follows in his own words: “If the only thing I have of reality is the information about it then this information is reality." Physics and chemistry are equally creative activities, just like poetry and painting. The clarification only provided myths.
The lecture, which also presented an overview of the history of development, asked the listeners to get involved in the idea. At the end there was also opposition from the audience. But there is also very reliable scientific knowledge, a listener interjected. “In the end, one remains amazed that a science whose approach is to understand reality as possibility is so successful,” replied Fischer. The scientist also appeared open-minded and exuberantly enthusiastic in his dialogue with his audience for his own subject. He added: “Quantum theory is far from complete.”
The Book:
“The hour of the physicists. "Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and the Innermost of the World" (288 pages), published as 2nd edition in 2022 by Beck-Verlag, Munich.
