Three articles in one publication.

This is a kind of continuation of my note “Reconstruction of thinking No. 2”, written on December 25, 2018.

There were two drawings by Niels Bohr.

As Abraham Pais describes with light and kind irony: “The word “HARMONY” looked like this in Bohr’s performance. Fig A.

But as the discussion progressed, Bohr did not like the word “HARMONY.” He paced restlessly in circles, then stopped, his face lit up with a glimmer of thought. “That’s it. It is necessary to change “HARMONY” to “UNIFORMITY”. He grabbed the chalk again, paused for a moment, looking at what he had written earlier, and then made the only change: tapping the chalkboard with a triumphant look! Fig.”

End of quote.

After reading these lines of Paice’s book and looking at the drawings, we all smiled good-naturedly following the author’s quirks of the great physicist.

AND me too… then.

And now a strange thought poked into my head: After all, this drawing by Bohr, which was in his mind a “HARMONY”, it WAS SUPPOSED TO somehow REFLECT Bohr’s own way of thinking.

This is by no means a quirk of talent!

This is a reflection of Bohr’s train of thought! Bohr drew HIS THOUGHT CHAIN on the board!!!

And now, if this guess is at least partially close to the truth, I myself have taken on the most difficult mission:

In what coordinates should I draw this mental chain???

Or, WHAT was Bohr thinking about when he “painted these concepts”?

Not topographically, of course, in terms of the brain and time! Bohr’s thought first descended from the upper layer of the crust, described a semicircle there, rose higher again, but BEFORE reaching the highest layer, hesitated there, and then made a steep dive down, slightly back in time to the lowest layer.the cortex of his brain!

And the final solution that changed the concept of “Harmony” to “Uniformity” is the added bold dot above the oscillatory curve!

I cannot accept this idea in terms of “time is the level of thought in the cortex”, that is, how the neurons of his brain connected. It’s too rude, stupid, and primitive.

But which ones then???

Let’s go back to the beginning of the episode.

In 1943, the 300th anniversary of Isaac Newton’s birth was celebrated, and Bohr prepared his speech on Newton’s work in the summer in the presence of Pais.

At first, when describing certain works or Newton’s work, he wanted to use the word “Harmony.” And he depicted his visual vision of this word with a kind of sinuous line.

So, in what coordinates did Bohr see the Newtonian harmony of thought?

What kind of phase space can represent harmony with such a squiggle?

Let’s change the description of Paice a little bit, replace the phrase “the word Harmony”, “the concept of Harmony”, “Bohr’s idea of Harmony”.

Now you can try to solve the problem in different ways.

Mathematically:

Task: To find a certain conformal representation of the concept of “harmony”, which, by adding only one bold dot above it, turns into the concept of “uniformity”.

Because I’m dumb about math, like… rhinoceros, then I won’t even take on such a thing!

Maybe we should draw a musical notation and the intersections of the Bohr curve with the lines of the notation will give us musical notation signs, some kind of harmonious melody?

I am not a musician, and therefore I will leave this idea.

What is “Harmony” in the broadest sense of the word?

This is a kind of harmony, proportionality, coherence, coincidence of certain parts of the whole.

For example, the face of Grace Kelly, the most beautiful woman in the world, is (in my opinion) extraordinarily harmonious, a masterpiece from which nothing can be taken away and nothing can be added.

What is “Uniformity”?

It is a kind of unity, subordination to one main task or thought. (In the dictionary, this is the same as “monotony, the same, similar to another.” In relation to the works of Newton and the thoughts of Bohr, this is clearly “not that”!)

WHAT was going through Bohr’s mind at that moment?

First, the harmony of all Newton’s works, their harmony, the consistency of his theories with each other, forming a kind of coherent system of laws.

But he didn’t like it, although, as we can see, he DIDN’T ERASE the harmony drawing. But if all the harmony of the works of the great physicist of the past WAS SUBORDINATED to a single goal, grew out of it, then a certain main “REFERENCE POINT” was needed, in the outgoing rays of which the beauty of harmony arose and shone!

AND Bohr PUT THIS POINT!!!

All of the above is just my speculation, an attempt to somehow connect Bohr’s train of thought with the picture he drew and the thought chains that arose in his brain.

Was it possible, at least a piece?

I DON’T KNOW…!

22 II 2021

P.S. Continuing to think about the question he had asked himself, I decided that Bohr was thinking about Newton, his style of work, and was also trying to put himself in his place and understand what guided the great physicist and mathematician. This means that the curve of “harmony” drawn by him should not be considered as some kind of whim of the scientist’s imagination, some abstraction not specifically tied to anything, but as an attempt to “graphically” depict the harmony of Newton’s works and/or thoughts.

Let’s say the harmony curve is enclosed in a two–dimensional phase space, where time is counted along the X-axis, the simplest option. And along the Y–axis is the “diving depth” of Newton’s thought.

Then one “dive” can be the creation of a system of three laws of mechanics.

The fluctuations at the top are smaller, less fundamental works, optics, say, maybe, differential calculus, and so on. And the last ragged dive with an attempt to return to the SYSTEM (unfulfilled) is the Law of Universal Gravitation, a purely empirical law that explains Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, but without trying to answer the main question:

AND WHAT is gravity? Hypotheses non fingo! I’m not making up hypotheses! – As Newton wrote in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Although that’s all I’ve really been doing!

No, time along the X-axis is not suitable, since Newton could not go back in time.

Although, if we assume that once upon a time, he used to think about the problems of combining the three laws into a certain system and at some point THOUGHT back to the old idea. You can time travel anywhere in your mind. Let’s complicate the previous formulation of the X-axis a little bit. She is no longer as simple as she was at first. The X–axis is NOT the axis of the real time of Newton’s life, but the axis of the temporal movement of his thoughts!!!

P.P.S. NONSENSE! Cm. Continuation of this topic with the addition of “A clue?” and “Post Scriptum to the note “Change the harmony to… THE ANSWER?”

Swap HARMONY for UNIFORMITY. A CLUE?

On the left is the Harmony and Uniformity of Bohr.

He’s a strange guy, this Esprit. He is “tormented” by the question: Why Niels Bohr in 1943, preparing for a lecture dedicated to the tercentenary of Newton’s birth, first drew on the blackboard “Harmony” in his mind (Fig. A), but then, feeling some mental anxiety, replaced it with “Uniformity” (Fig. B).

And now, if not the answer, then at least a hypothesis that could be the answer.

So:

Bohr DID NOT LIKE TO WRITE.

Bohr liked to DICTATE to someone.

Why?

Bohr was prevented from recording his thoughts, this distracted his mental chain, which was just emerging in consciousness, somewhere into an unnecessary routine of writing, when his thought was at the same time paving, groping a path into SOMETHING NEW!!!

Therefore, he preferred to dictate, that is, to actually THINK OUT LOUD. This did not distract his thoughts from groping for the right moves and leaps forward.

In the summer of 1943, while still at his summer house in Tiswilde, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, he was preparing for a lecture. His companion, friend, and assistant scribe was the young Dutch physicist Abraham Pais.

(Whose fate was also very dramatic. He was hiding from the Nazis, but was caught and sent to prison, from where he was soon to be taken out to be shot. And it was only thanks to the extraordinary courage and resourcefulness of a Dutch girl, Tineke Buchter, and a letter from physicist Krammers to Heisenberg that he miraculously escaped, or rather was saved by her…

Tineke Buchter, married to Strobos, is an absolutely heroic and legendary personality. She was arrested nine times by the Gestapo and interrogated there, nevertheless, she did not give up any of the Jews she was hiding in her house.)

Bohr, thinking, went to the blackboard and wrote HARMONY on it (Fig. A). This is how Pais describes his art with good-natured irony.

But then he didn’t like this word, he started looking for another word and FOUND it – UNIFORMITY (Fig.C), putting a bold dot on the board above “Harmony”.

And such a thought just occurred to me.

If you write the word “Harmony” in Latin, then it looks a little like the drawing “A” by Bohr. If the first letter and the tail of the last one are “drowned” below all the other letters. But Bohr himself wanted to write something DIFFERENT, and therefore his own drawing depicting “Harmony” rather depicted the similarity of the letters “UNIFORMITY”. And a bold dot was placed over the “i”, which was not in “Harmony”!!! Therefore, Bohr triumphantly put a bold dot above a certain zigzag of the drawing, where Bohr represented the letters in the Latin word with wavy lines! (See above – he didn’t like to write!).

Is this just another attempt by me to get rid of some inner anxiety in an attempt to UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS GOING ON IN BOHR’s HEAD THEN, in the summer of 1943?

And HOW the painted “Harmony” turned into the word “Uniformity” by hitting the chalk on the board

24 VII 2021

Post Scriptum to the note “Change the harmony to… A CLUE?”

This note 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.

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.

I am almost sure that if Pais had asked Bohr AT that moment WHY he had considered SUCH a “formulation” successful and final by hitting the chalk on the board and putting just a DOT, Bohr HIMSELF WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO CLEARLY ANSWER THIS SIMPLE QUESTION ABOUT THE COURSE OF HIS THOUGHTS!!!

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 at all, succeeded!

I congratulate myself on that!

Faciant meliora potentes.

6 VIII 2024