Supratim's Teacher's Special

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Dear Sir,

I am very happy to learn that you are having two full meals a day with snacks thrown in between. Right after Lucknowi and Hyderabadi biriyanis, snacks are a wonderful invention, a perfect filler for those times when its too early or too late for a full meal. For instance, here I am at 1.30 in the night munching away on nimki which provides the right amount of saltiness and crunchiness with zero nutritional value :)

Your beautifully written piece "Wild surmise" reminded me of an account I had read of Heisenberg's emotions around the time he discovered the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics. Thanks to Google, I soon found the piece I was looking for. I am sure you have read this one before, but I thought I would send it to you anyway since it fits in well with RKN, Leonov et al's feelings that you described in that blog. Such ephemeral moments are hard to come by but the experience is thrilling beyond description or as Wordsworth aptly put it in a different context - "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions"
 

Best Regards

Supratim

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It was late spring in Göttingen, and Heisenberg suffered from an allergy attack so severe that he could hardly work. He asked his research director, Max Born, for a vacation, and spent it on the rocky North Sea island of Helgoland. At first he was so ill that he could only stay in his rented room and admire the view of the sea. As his condition improved he began to take walks and to swim. With further improvement he began also to read Goethe and to work on physics. With nothing to distract him, he concentrated intensely on the problems that had faced him in Göttingen. 

Heisenberg reproduced his earlier work, cleaning up the mathematics and simplifying the formulation. He worried that the mathematical scheme he invented might prove to be inconsistent, and in particular that it might violate the principle of the conservation of energy. In Heisenberg's own words: 

One evening I reached the point where I was ready to determine the individual terms in the energy table, or, as we put it today, in the energy matrix, by what would now be considered an extremely clumsy series of calculations. When the first terms seemed to accord with the energy principle, I became rather excited, and I began to make countless arithmetical errors. As a result, it was almost three o'clock in the morning before the final result of my computations lay before me. The energy principle had held for all the terms, and I could no longer doubt the mathematical consistency and coherence of the kind of quantum mechanics to which my calculations pointed. At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me. I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea. I now did so without too much trouble, and waited for the sun to rise.

http://www.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/StrangeQM/history.html

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