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 bracket. This Lie algebra is a one-dimensional central extension of the commutative Lie algebra formula_57, isomorphic to the Lie algebra of the Heisenberg group. The general abstraction of a Heisenberg group is constructed from any symplectic vector space. For example, let ("V",ω) be a finite-dimensional real symplectic vector space (so ω is a nondegenerate skew symmetric bilinear form on "V"). The Heisenberg group H("V") on ("V",ω) (or simply "V" for brevity) is the set "V"×R endowed with the group law The Heisenberg group is a central extension of the additive group "V". Thus there is an exact sequence Any symplectic