Physics and Beyond "'Do you see whales, Heisenberg?', 'Yes, I see only whales, but I hope they are only big waves.'", is one of humorous scenes when the author, Bohr and other friends were sailing in a dark night. The book provides a first-hand account about how science is done and how quantum physics, especially the Copenhagen interpretation, emerged. "Nobody can reproduce these conversations verbatim, but I believe that the spirit of what the people said, and how they did, is conserved," the author tries to explain in the preface. Many believe that the golden years of physics around 1925, when "even small
Heisenberg group "n"-dimensional systems, and most generally, to any symplectic vector space. In the three-dimensional case, the product of two Heisenberg matrices is given by: Since the multiplication is not commutative, the group is non-abelian. The neutral element of the Heisenberg group is the identity matrix, and inverses are given by The group is a subgroup of the 2-dimensional affine group Aff(2): formula_2 acting on formula_6 corresponds to the affine transform formula_7. There are several prominent examples of the three-dimensional case. If , are real numbers (in the ring R) then one has the continuous Heisenberg group H(R). It is a nilpotent