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 an overall phase factor. The phase factor is needed to obtain a group of operators, since translations in position space and translations in momentum space do not commute. The key result is the Stone–von Neumann theorem, which states that every (strongly continuous) irreducible unitary representation of the Heisenberg group in which the center acts nontrivially is equivalent to formula_48 for some formula_27. Alternatively, that they are all equivalent to the Weyl algebra (or CCR algebra) on a symplectic space of dimension 2"n". Since the Heisenberg group is a one-dimensional central extension of formula_57, its irreducible unitary representations can be viewed