This note is titled “Change harmony to uniformity. The solution?” was published on October 24, 2021. It was, in turn, a continuation of a note with a similar title “Change harmony to uniformity!” 22 II 2021, in which I tried to give some kind of “interpretation” to the episode described by theoretical physicist Abraham Pais in his book “Geniuses of Science”, in an article dedicated to Niels Bohr. This attempt (the second in chronology) was EXTREMELY UNSUCCESSFUL and STUPID, because then I “DID NOT grasp the driving gear of the phenomenon.”

And, well, it was only five months later that it clearly happened and I managed to catch the CLUE!

Now let’s ask ourselves a seemingly simple question: How many physicists are there on earth?

The following article by a certain Charles Day from the journal Physics Today 17 IV 2015 provides approximate data on the number of physicists. From 964,000 to 372,000.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/19105/One-million-physicists

For the 34 countries that make up 80% of the world’s population, I derived a high estimate of 772 000 and a low estimate of 297 000. Renormalizing for 100% of the population yields 964 000 and 372 000. The world might not have a million physicists, but that’s the right order of magnitude.

My next question is:

How many of these hundreds of thousands of physicists have read Paice’s paper on Bohr?

Let’s say one in a hundred.

The following question is purely rhetorical:

Who of these who read the description of the funny episode with Bohr in the summer of 1943, except that he smiled good-naturedly, like Pais, at Bohr’s strange quirk, THOUGHT about WHAT WAS GOING ON IN NIELS BOHR’s MIND at the very time when he first “DREW” Harmony, and then with a stroke of chalk on the blackboard triumphantly replaced the drawing with “UNIFORMITY”?

Answer: NO ONE!!!

Except Esprit.

This somehow alarmed me, some kind of mental discomfort arose in my mind, I wanted to “scan” Bohr’s brain at that very moment eighty years ago, and understand the course of his thoughts.

I tried to do it twice and to no avail. And only for the third time, it finally succeeded!

Therefore, I consider this event to be one of my most remarkable intellectual achievements:

To get into the mind of a long–dead great physicist, to feel the course of his thought and give him an accurate description is simply incredible luck!

Which I am rightfully proud of.

NOT a single person in the world, not one of the most knowledgeable and educated theoretical physicist or historian of physics has done this, yes, no one just DID NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, but I, not a theoretical physicist, succeeded!

I congratulate myself on that!

Faciant meliora potentes.

6 VIII 2024