In a beautiful, albeit unevenly written, book with the idiotic title “Geniuses of Science” by Abraham Pais, a world-renowned theoretical physicist, there is such an episode that occurred in 1929, when Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg sailed on a steamer from America to Japan:

“Heisenberg told me a story that happened during the trip and which is a rare opportunity to look at the attitude of Dirac to the opposite sex:

We sailed from America to Japan, and I enjoyed participating in the life of the steamer. For example, I danced in the evenings. For some reason, Paul didn’t like it very much, but he sat on a chair and watched the dancers. One day, after another dance, I sat down next to him and he asked:

“Heisenberg, why are you dancing?”

I replied:

“Well, there are cute girls here who are nice to dance with…”

He thought about it for a long time and after about five minutes asked:

“Heisenberg, how do you know IN ADVANCE that they’re cute?”

End of quote.

I admit, this question stunned me with its surprise.

Dirac was 26-27 years old at the time, Heisenberg was a year older.

In order to understand the reason for this question, I tried to model Dirac’s thinking.

A young man who has been hanging out with girls asks a friend a question that is natural for a scientist:

How did Heisenberg know in ADVANCE that girls were cute??? So he had some information about this quality of them, and the information was generalized, he knew about MANY girls that they were CUTE!

Maybe Heisenberg secretly wrote a certain equation, from which exactly such a solution followed???

Maybe he uses his famous “Uncertainty Ratio” to identify this physical “hidden parameter” of girls?

I would understand him if he said “beautiful” – it can be visually distinguished.

If he had said “well–built” – too, although the lighting is a little “subdued”, but still sufficient.

Or dressed in beautiful dresses…

Or with beautiful hairstyles…

But HOW does he know, without being a telepath, that they are “CUTE”???

That’s the question, I would have thought Hamletishly.

So, when I tried to think like Paul Dirac, I found myself in a complete mental dead end. And neither five minutes of reflection nor five years will be enough here.

We need to change something!

What?

Let’s try to psychoanalyze Dirac’s thinking NOT ACCORDING to Sigmund Freud!

The error in Dirac’s thinking was set by him from the very beginning, by a certain preset:

Girls have a certain quality, an attribute unique to them, called “GRACE.” Like, say, electrons, which have mass, charge, spin, a de Broglie wave at a certain momentum, and so on. The way of thinking is quite normal!!!

In fact, Heisenberg didn’t say THAT at all! He said, “Lovely girls who are pleasant to dance with,” that is, he described HIS feelings and perceptions. It wasn’t the girls who were “cute”, it wasn’t the INDIVIDUAL quality of the girls, like the electrons, but they were CUTE to a young man named Werner Heisenbrg because of the hormone commands that were natural for such an age.

Translating into the language of quantum mechanics, this property manifested itself only in the INTERACTION of two particles of different poles, different sexes, more precisely! Moreover, the “affinity” (of electrons and positrons) should have been mutual!

Having come to this conclusion, I felt relieved.

For the alternative, according to Dirac, would be a very long (and fruitless) search in Heisenberg’s works for solutions to the equations and a detailed analysis of his matrix form, in which he clothed Quantum mechanics …

18 V 2020

P.S. In 1934, Paul Dirac was working at Princeton when his colleague Eugene Wigner’s sister Margit, whom everyone called Manci, came to visit.

Mansi later recalled his courtship with love and tenderness.

They got married in January 1937.

“It was a very old-fashioned Victorian marriage.”

For life..