The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998) | Hacker News Reader

The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

aps.org

255 pointsoccamschainsaw146 comments

I use to frequent a grad student bar that regularly held an open-mic night for people to practice their defense. It was brutal. A room full of drunk grad and post-grads would try and pick apart your presentation. Targeted academic heckling. It was great. The goal was to get over your fear of the whole process -no matter what, your actual defense would be a better experience.

A comedian friend in LA said something like this is an institution there.

You spend months/years hitting these clubs to test and refine a bit, while developing all the skills. Some audience make a sport of the heckling, especially some of the other aspiring comedians.

(She said the worst hecklers were the drunk fratbros who imagined themselves comedians, and their own bits were the kind that only their friends would think were funny, but they sure would be demanding of others.)

It was good practice, but brutal, especially if you're weary from living poor, and hanging in there while trying to make it in LA.

Lots of parallels with grad school.

Someone once told me I should be a comedian. So if academia doesn't pay me enough, I guess I know where to go next!

Many years ago I worked for a professor who allowed me into weekly meetings which were mostly of touring faculty, presenters, or academics on the job market.

The audience was always a pretty stable group of multidisciplinary, world-class faculty. Most of them were cordial but there were a few aggressive ones too. I remember a statistician who drove real hard. I didn't know any of the words he said, but the room felt electrified every time he started.

It was like intellectual UFC, but hero vs mob. I felt for the speakers, but as a fly on the wall, it was amazing. I haven't experienced anything like it since.

Sounds like a "Murder Board" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_board

This is so awesome! I want to take part in something like this. It's probably great for grad students to practice asking questions to a presenter as well. So many young PhD students avoid asking questions during talks, especially in subjects they don't know very well, because they are nervous about asking a "dumb" question.

Many departments have some kind of "informal lunch talks" for and by grad students, particularly in the summer. People often practice their defenses there. The advantage is everyone is in your field so the grilling can be pretty close to what professors will focus on.

gosh that sounds like fun, what school was this for? where was it?

We need more good bars like this.

Reminds me of who were on Fourier’s doctoral defense committee: Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre, who all have a “list of things named after” page on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Jos...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Pie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Adr...

For what it's worth, I just spent ~10 minutes looking for a solid source on this and couldn't find confirmation.

The closest I found was a bio[1], which includes the following:

> The Institute set as a prize competition subject the propagation of heat in solid bodies for the 1811 mathematics prize. Fourier submitted his 1807 memoir together with additional work on the cooling of infinite solids and terrestrial and radiant heat. Only one other entry was received and the committee set up to decide on the award of the prize, Lagrange, Laplace, Malus, Haüy and Legendre, awarded Fourier the prize.

So it's not entirely wrong, but I think that all-star team was not his defense committee.

[1] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fourier

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-98098-0_... states the same, and mentions what I couldn’t find earlier: that they criticized Fourier for his lack of rigour (I remember that as something along the lines of “but if that’s correct, this also is and that can’t be true, can it?”, (with “this” being Gibb’s phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon)), but chances are high that isn’t happen, either.

Edit: https://www.comsol.com/blogs/happy-birthday-joseph-fourier/ has more info. If he did a thesis defense (did he?), I guess there’s a decent chance Laplace and Lagrange (his supervisor, according to https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=17981) were there.

Legendre seems doubtful. Weirdly, Legendre doesn’t seem to exist in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Edit 2: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16775/16775-h/16775-h.htm#PA... (by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Arago, who was only 18 years younger than Fourier) is the best I can find on this. It says:

“The first memoir of Fourier on the theory of heat dates from the year 1807. The Academy, to which it was communicated, being desirous of inducing the author to extend and improve his researches, made the question of the propagation of heat the subject of the great mathematical prize which was to be awarded in the beginning of the year 1812. Fourier did, in effect, compete, and his memoir was crowned. But, alas! as Fontenelle said: "In the country even of demonstrations, there are to be found causes of dissension." Some restrictions mingled with the favourable judgment. The illustrious commissioners of the prize, Laplace, Lagrange, and Legendre, while acknowledging the novelty and importance of the subject, while declaring that the real differential equations of the propagation of heat were finally found, asserted that they perceived difficulties in the way in which the author arrived at them. They added, that his processes of integration left something to be desired, even on the score of rigour. They did not, however, support their opinion by any arguments.”

And Fourier continued in that tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Jos...

Wow, that defense should be a movie or something.

It was a good match, as Joseph Fourier does too:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_J...

One of my favourite positive doctoral viva stories was Wittgenstein, who presented "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" as his dissertation, which had already been published and was already considered a masterpiece. The report was something like "We consider the work of Mr Wittgenstein to be the work of a genius. Nevertheless, it fulfills the criteria for a Cambridge doctorate".

Edit to add: The actual quote (which I just found) was from G.E. Moore (Bertrand Russell was the other examiner): "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree."

Very funny to me that on the way out of the room Wittgenstein allegedly "clapped the two examiners [Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore] on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.'"

That seems on-brand, if off-base, for Wittgenstein; so perhaps he did.

Probably because it was a bunch of nonsense. Wittgenstein has no place in the same sentence as Bertrand Russell.

Wittgenstein is generally considered to be one of most important philosophers of the 20th century, if not the most important. Analytic philosophy has largely lost interest in Russell's works (Kripke was far more important and is generally considered the person who "cleaned" a lot of Russell's deadend projects), while analytic and "continental" philosophy still avidly discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and the fallouts from that work were a profound reassessment and shake up of philosophy. Russell is probably more well known nowadays as a popularizer of certain ideas in philosophy, as a general interest and political writer, and as a philosopher that typified the particular era in which he wrote, and less so for the actual philosophical ideas he sought to argue for. His History of Western Philosophy book for instance is quite famously bad.

Most people today would question if Russell should be put in the same sentence as Wittgenstein.

Not based on the Tractatus, however. Which had it's moment but it contains some of the greatest boners ever written. The confusion of probability with simple logic trees is beyond hilarious from a modern perspective.

Don’t worry, the reassessment which happened to Russell will undoubtedly befell Wittgenstein when the time has come. Both worked on the fairly uninteresting part of philosophy anyway.

"When Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was originally published—in German in 1921, and in English in 1922—Bertrand Russell was much better known. In fact, Wittgenstein relied on Russell to get his manuscript published in the first place, and it was Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus that encouraged publishers to consider accepting it at all. While Wittgenstein was grateful for Russell’s efforts, he was dismayed by his introduction, feeling that not even his former professor understood him. For Russell’s part, he was by this time exhausted by his relationship with the young Austrian who had been his student at Trinity in the years leading up to the First World War." [1]

[1] https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letter/wittgenstein

I found the book "The world as I found it" by Bruce Duffy to be a fairly good read on this subject.

There is an even scarier story about Heisenberg, from late in WW2. From https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00963402114330... :

> In November 1944, the OSS learned that Heisenberg planned to visit Switzerland the next month. Former major league baseball catcher and then OSS officer Moe Berg was dispatched to Zurich with orders that “Heisenberg must be rendered hors de combat” (out of action) if Heisenberg gave evidence that the German bomb effort was close to completion. Apparently Berg alone was to decide whether or not to kill Heisenberg (Powers, 1993: 391–392).

> With a pistol in his pocket, Berg attended a lecture by Heisenberg, waiting for some sign of an advanced German atomic bomb program. Heisenberg offered no such signal and therefore survived. Instead, Berg reflected on his own “uncertainty principle” in regard to killing Heisenberg, a reference to the scientist’s most prominent contribution to the theory of quantum mechanics (Powers, 1993: 398–399).

> Later that week, as the Battle of the Bulge turned to Allied advantage, Berg attended a dinner given for Heisenberg and heard him lament Germany’s coming loss of the war. This appeared to clinch the case that Heisenberg could not be part of a successful atomic bomb project and effectively ended any further US interest in killing him (Powers, 1993).

Zes, I recall the movie titled "The Catcher Was A Spy" which has this series of events captured in satisfactory detail.

As a physicist i find this quite comforting. It's good to keep in mind that even the most transformative thinkers in the history of science had reasons to experience impostor syndrome. Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well.

No matter how good you are, physics will regularly present you with problems that you can't solve. Statistically speaking, most of the time spent doing science is spent being wrong. As soon as you figure a system out your work is essentially done and you move on to being wrong about a different problem. The psychology is very different from working problem sets, writing an app, or defending a political position, yet we don't really prepare students for these realities as we probably should.

> "Statistically speaking, most of the time spent doing science is spent being wrong. As soon as you figure a system out your work is essentially done and you move on to being wrong about a different problem."

That's a remarkably good quote. Definitely very true.

I would argue that grad students prepare pretty well for that, and it's one of the main mindset shifts you're expected to make in grad school vs undergrad. Regardless, though, it's not something that gets broad appreciation.

> Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well.

Isn't it a myth? http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...

Einstein was not a very good mathematician. This quote from David Hilbert sums it up well:

“Every boy in the streets of Göttingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.”

It's sort of a yes and no. The belief that Einstein was bad at math in school is a myth. He did just fine in mathematics at school.

But relative to other theoretical physicists he was not the strongest mathematician.

Einstein not only "did fine" but was extremely precocious. From the wiki entry:

- - -

Einstein excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers. The 12-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer.[28] Einstein also independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem aged 12.[29] A family tutor Max Talmud says that after he had given the 12-year-old Einstein a geometry textbook, after a short time "[Einstein] had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow."[30] His passion for geometry and algebra led the 12-year-old to become convinced that nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure".[30] Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he says he had "mastered integral and differential calculus".[31]

- - -

At age 16, he tried to skip the last two years of gymnasium and directly go to University -- to what is now known as ETH, a fantastically rigorous and selective research university -- but failed the entrance examination. He excelled at the math and physics portions, but of course did not pass in the humanities questions covering material he never studied. This is what caused many myths about him getting kicked out of school, or failing to graduate, etc. In reality, this just means he needed to attend a gymnasium to get the required secondary education in the humanities that he tried to skip.

Starting with university, he did focus on physics, so compared to many theoretical physicists who had the equivalent of a dual math/physics PhD, Einstein's PhD was more physics focused, and for this reason he is not considered as strong of a mathematician as he is a physicist, but this doesn't mean he wasn't good at math, or that he received failing grades, or that he dropped out, etc.

Which other theoretical physicists were amazingly great at mathematics? I am genuinly curious.

I am certainly not alluding that Einstein was great at maths. But I do think he was good enough.

von Neuman is someone I think was a beast but he was more of a mathrmatician than a physicist (at least I think so).

I'm not an expert by any means, but my understanding is that Dirac was a highly accomplished mathematician, and of course Hilbert made his name in mathematics before moving to study physics.

Dirac came from a later generation than Einstein. For example during Einstein's annus mirabilis (1905) I doubt very many physicists knew of tensor calculus considering it was only developed a decade beforehand. During that time the mathematics physicists learnt was very much the traditional topics of analysis: series expansions, special functions, integral equations, calculus of variations, quadratic forms and of course partial differential equations. Hilbert himself actually wrote a textbook with Richard Courant covering these topics: Methods of Mathematical Physics. As such I don't really think many physicists of Einstein's generation knew lots of mathematics simply because it wasn't taught at the time. In the decades since physicists gradually has generally become more "mathematised" so to speak. In Dirac's generation tensor calculus and group representation theory became important, than in general abstract algebra and functional analysis, then as differential geometry became more well developed that gets taught and closer to the modern day you can find top theoretical physics students learning all sorts of abstract mathematics like algebraic topology.

Most definitely a myth. The mathematics of the physics he worked on is not simple. But of course there is also the time honored and long standing friendly animosity between physicist math and "real" math, in which scant few physicists are "good at math."

> Einstein

Because everyone knows Einstein was the smartest person that ever lived and the best physicist ever, right? Einstein is only famous because of the press he got, because the press glorified him without knowing why, and everyone read the press. Sure he was bright, but he was also all too human. Everyone thinks he single-handedly changed physics forever while in isolation as a desk clerk at a patent office, but the truth is he stood firmly on the shoulders of giants like Poincaré and Lorentz, not to mention his teacher Minkowski and his friend Grossman. Nearly all of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually someone elses' ideas. Neither Relativity nor the constancy of the speed of light were Einstein's ideas, and not remotely so. History just gave him all the credit.

Hopefully you're not wrong but uncertain, if you were wrong you'd be confident you were right.

>Einstein famously had a lot of trouble with math as well

This is false.

Yes, Einstein himself directly addressed the myth, noting he'd mastered calculus by about 12.

It is probably true that he was not the mathematician that many other theoretical physicists are. How would you compare him with von Neumann?

But that's a different thing than the common myth that he was bad at math!

>>> he still had difficulty with it! And again, when Bohr pointed out the error, it led to emotional difficulties for Heisenberg.

This resonates with me deeply - knowledge that I "should" have known but are shamed for not knowing become massively harder to learn. I think I somehow label that area as "not part of my identity" and so if I need to learn it Indont have an intellectual challenge I have to resolve past trauma and adjust my view of myself. And accept past failings

It's easier now but I see this in kids learning maths or in my own money management etc.

We need to be kinder to ourselves.

> We need to be kinder to ourselves.

Everyone else needs to be kinder to themselves. I, on the other hand, am a worthless piece of shit who deserves no kindness.

Resolving that obvious hypocrisy would require me to accept that I'm "not special"; see, singling myself out as the sole human being who deserves to hate themselves keeps me in a special category. You already mentioned the real problem:

> identity

Yup, there it is. "Part of my identity" and "not part of my identity" are stupid and useless characterizations that we all, me included, cling to desperately. It's extremely freeing to give up parts of your own identity. I try, but it's hard. It feels like death ... but then if it works, it feels like a rebirth. Hating myself is one of the hardest parts of my identity to give up. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to.

But let's all agree to ruthlessly murder those awful "I'm just not good at math" parts of our identities, and help everyone else murder their own. It's such an easy virus to catch, and so damaging.

Psychedelics can help with this for some people.

> The result was that Heisenberg received the lowest of three passing grades in physics and the same overall grade (cum laude) for his doctorate

I don't think that's accurate - there are usually 4 passing grades for dissertations in Germany, the lowest passing grade being "rite". It would be surprising if "cum laude", which literally means "with praise", was the lowest passing grade at Heisenberg's university (edit: Wikipedia confirms 4 passing grades for Heisenberg's dissertation: "summa cum laude", "magna cum laude", "cum laude", and "passed" [0]).

The standard grades for dissertations in Germany are "summa cum laude" (=very good with distinction), "magna cum laude" (=very good), "cum laude" (=good), "rite" (=sufficient), and "insuffizienter" (=failed). Some faculties have "satis bene" as an additional grade between "cum laude" and "rite".

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg#cite_note-2

Perhaps you have to read the OP in the spirit of Futurama:

Professor Ogden Wernstrom : I give your invention the worst grade imaginable: an A-minus-minus.

Interestingly, this type of entrenchment has not changed in my opinion.

There is always a professor of distinguished, but long forgotten and superseded past-expertise on the orals.

They will insist on nuanced competence in an area no longer necessary to forge ahead. They become petty and claw with every breath to maintain relevance, despite all the others on the panel fully aware of the opposite.

Academia is a cesspool of barely-mediocrity, envy, and jealousy with pockets of brilliance flashing up time to time.

In my opinion.

> There is always a professor of distinguished, but long forgotten and superseded past-expertise on the orals.

Wait, are you claiming that knowledge of experimental physics is "long forgotten and superseded"? As a mathematician, I'm all for recognising the importance of theoretical physics, and think that there's no reason a good theoretical physicist has also to be a good experimental physicist—but I wouldn't go so far as casting experimental physics on the dustheap! From the relatively sparse information given, the questions asked, about the operation of basic optical instruments like the telescope and the microscope, do not seem like questions that are excessively recondite; they do seem to indicate a basis lack of competence as an experimental physicist (which Heisenberg neither was nor apparently much wanted to be).

I think I did not make myself clear.

When I read the article, I gathered that there was a necessity for expert in A to make orals in B because their style of presentation. To achieve acceptance at B, there were non-relevant to A requirements.

Did I misunderstood?

I'd quibble with "non-relevant"

The goal of qualifying exams to produce well-rounded students---or at least ensure that they are minimally aware of the major intellectual traditions in their field.

It's not crazy to expect that a soon-to-be physics professor understands how a battery works, at least roughly.

> When I read the article, I gathered that there was a necessity for expert in A to make orals in B because their style of presentation. To achieve acceptance at B, there were non-relevant to A requirements.

But you did not say "knowledge in A is not relevant to B" (itself an arguable claim, as my sibling commenter mattkrause points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910025 )); you seemed to be dismissing the validity of "knowledge in A" entirely ("There is always a professor of distinguished, but long forgotten and superseded past-expertise on the orals"). If you meant only the milder claim you make here, then, not being a physicist, I do not think I am qualified to judge, and so withdraw my objection.

Did we read the same thing? The article goes on to describe that the exact thing that the professor insisted was important for Heisenberg to know, was later on important for Heisenberg to know.

OTOH, I will submit that oral exams can really test familiarity of a subject well.

I found this in my own high school and university orals - I prepared much better for those and probably remember to this day many things I would have otherwise forgotten. I also found the exams absolutely terrifying, there's just no easy way to bullshit your way out. My examiners weren't mean at all.

Lem (of course!) expands on that in his Pilot Pirx stories esp. [1]. He agrees with you ;)

[1] https://royallib.com/read/Lem_Stanislaw/The_Conditioned_Refl...

Having just finished the epic Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, my mind goes to a different place —- Heisenberg was at the core of the German bomb project. Speculatively, I wonder how things might have gone a different way had he been required to be a brilliant experimentalist too. Success versus failure hinged on nitty-gritty experimental details, not on sweeping theoretical insight.

Probably not, but then again — Germany is where fission was discovered and an also a powerhouse of chemical engineering. Not all of German science fled the nazis.

I don't know. Having the theoretical and experimental physics talent was a necessary condition for producing the atomic bomb, but was not sufficient. What was lacking was a government willing and able to commit to a crash program building the novel industrial base for isotope separation, radiochemical separation, and all the other things detailed in Rhodes' (and others books).

It's true that the NAZI govt thought the war would be won or lost in a couple of years, so longer programs weren't much valued. But they invested in rockets which didn't come into play quickly. The German physicists told the govt the bomb was far off; but there's every reason to think the scientists knew better and deliberately fudged their calculations.

Agreed that this is low probability. But it did strike me that the Nazi brass were most interested in such a crash program, at one point declaring that it should be given top priority. What dissuaded them were the apparent failures of early efforts and lack of confidence of the scientists themselves — the scientists got hung up on use of heavy water as a neutron moderator, among other suboptimal practical decisions.

You might also like

Now it Can Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie R. Groves

I thought it did a good job at talking about how the Army made everything happen.

Thanks for this suggestion. I couldn’t believe the quality of the Rhodes book.

Yep, both are fantastic.

Really appreciate articles like these...it somewhat reflects how society expects people to conform, but it's always the outliers that manage to change the world.

Thank you for sharing...

I thought the story was that Heisenberg did not know either where the exam was, or when the exam was. :-)

Oh he knew both, just not very precisely.

It's not a sad story. It's a lesson to others.

It's interesting how the story switches between reasons. To me, the most salient is: "could not overcome Heisenberg's complete lack of interest and gave up the effort".

Attention to detail has been one of my largest issues in mistakes I've made, and this reminds me that sometimes that's what is required.

And sometimes what's required is putting a draft on arxiv.org and waiting for the criticism or roast.

Growing up in a house where your parent is worried about your performance in a subfield and reaches out to experts in the field. That's the complicated double-edged sword.

"could not overcome Heisenberg's complete lack of interest and gave up the effort"

We all want to excel so naturally we pick topics which seem easy to us and thus can expect to excel further in them. If we did not do well in some topic earlier, we are not very interested in it, because the best we can hope is to do ok in that subject.

I did not like "technical drawing" in my first year and so I found a way to pass without taking that course. Now I lament I didn't take it. But I wanted to excel, not be mediocre in something.

I wish this psychological observation was taught to first year students.

Why Technical Drawing is important? Because anything we envision in our mind is in essence a 3-D model. If we can draw it on paper it helps to clarify our thoughts. We can not envision anything 4-D, can we? Being able to draw 3-D objects on paper(or computer) with correct perspective is invaluable I now think.

> We can not envision anything 4-D, can we?

We definitely can draw 4-D in paper. It just needs much more work.

I find it impossible to visualize 4-D objects in my head. On paper the best you can do I think is show the projection of a 4-D object onto 3-D space which is then projected onto the flat 2-D surface. But I still can't visualize how a 4-D object would "look" because it seems our brains are hardwired to comprehend "objects" as 3-dimensional beings.

TIL that a brilliant physicist nearly failed his physics exam (sort of). What is revealing is the broad-based knowledge that was expected of any student of those times. Unlike the super-specialities of today. A career in such fields (rather in any field) in those days required total dedication to academics. Also the importance of oral arguments and oral debate.

> Unlike the super-specialities of today.

Many programs still administer pretty general qualifying exams.

Mine was about two-thirds systems neuroscience (close to my thesis topic), with some reinforcement learning (in the Sutton and Barto sense) and genetics of autism on the side. You were strongly encourage to pick at least one topic that would be "mind-expanding" rather than just thesis prep work. My spouse's department instead had a thesis/anti-thesis structure. They wrote two proposals, the real one that they intended to carry out and a second one on a totally different topic. They then defended both.

Both were written + oral exams. I found the oral part helpful (fun, even) because the conversation keeps the candidate and reviewer from getting hung up on minor points, while probing how they think. Plus, I think there's a bit of tradition in making the candidate sweat by seeing how far you can ratchet up the difficulty.

What I am surprised about is the "practical" component. I've never heard of a hands-on exam!

Sounds like the classic 4th Floor SHM committee

Indeed---Daeyeol was the RL person!

I'm guessing we just missed each other in grad school?

I knew it had to be him when you said Sutton and Barto.

Yeah, I think we just missed each other since your name sounds familiar.

There are plenty of petty turds in academia today who do similar things, ruining the careers and significantly negatively impacting the lives of students. When they decide that they do not like a student (for _any_ reason), they have unchecked means to make that student's life miserable, make them jump through extra hoops, get them removed from the program, psychologically torment them, etc.

I don't understand why this is the strongly held narrative here.

Those are some pretty major misses for a PhD candidate physicist. He would have been forwarded of this since he was forced to take one of the exam panels courses!

100% accurate!

Broad? Limited to the fields of the professors, like today. The story talks about the FPI, and an extensive lecture by one of the examiners about this topic. Like today, expect professors to ask about their favorite topics. The FPI seems suitable for a 1st year physics course today, if not even at school. That example shows how one-sided his interests were, not how much of everything was expected.

How many people who know how an FPI works could also explain quantum mechanics?

To become a PhD candidate at a non-top-tier Physics university, I had to derive similar trivia over a wide variety of physics topics in a sort of entry exam. I think it is quite normal. What I doubt is typical anymore is for this to be individual and oral. Also, it was quite typical to fail on your first few go rounds.

It is not. Like not at all. I know PhDs who know literally nothing outside the very narrow topic of their thesis. Like PhD in signal processing unable to understand a control system equation. I see that day in day out where I work. Lucky you, that have a decent title.

PhD programs, requirements and exams aren't standardized across institutions. Everyone's experience is different.

PhD graduates are extremely diverse in every possible measure. Some are deep generalists. Others are hyper specialized. Some can walk on water. Others leave you wondering how they managed to graduate.

Physics specifically has a long tradition of expecting a wide breadth of knowledge. For example, in every physics department i know details about, the expectation is that any professor is able to teach any class, and class assignments indeed change very regularly.

I think part of the reason is that the knowledge tends to be "use it or lose it" on a multi-year timescale. If you work with physicists who have been pidgeonholed in industry for decades then this is probably to be expected.

No, a degree in physics today is at least as demanding as it was back then. For instance, the topics discussed in the article, quantum mechanics and practical optics, are requirements in any physics degree I know of.

FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-port...

This reminds me of how Terence Tao almost failed his orals at Princeton. Turns out even the best in the field need to spend lots of time doing hard work.

https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf (less technical)

> In his laboratory work Heisenberg had to use a Fabry-Perot interferometer, a device for observing the interference of light waves, on which Wien had lectured extensively. But Heisenberg had no idea how to derive the resolving power of the interferometer nor, to Wien's surprise, could he derive the resolving power of such common instruments as the telescope and the microscope. When an angry Wien asked how a storage battery works, the candidate was still lost. Wien saw no reason to pass the young man, no matter how brilliant he was in other fields.

As a physicist, I feel like standards were much higher then! There's no way you would fail a student these days for not being able to derive something on the spot or know anything about a subject that isn't directly related to their PhD topic

Also a great illustration at points here of "imposter syndrome", or really that Heisenberg actually _was_ an imposter in certain senses. I understand it all too well. Being a physicist, or any kind of scientist, can be extremely emotional taxing and alienating

> When Heisenberg derived the uncertainty relations several years later, he used the resolving power of the microscope to derive the uncertainty relations-and he still had difficulty with it! And again, when Bohr pointed out the error, it led to emotional difficulties for Heisenberg.

It’s true of any profession. Most people only learn the exact skills they need for their very specific job. If you ask them about anything slightly out of the way they won’t know. (Some people are exceptions of course)

I think it’s one of the downsides of economic specialization. Although the upsides probably outweigh it substantially.

I don't think Heisenberg was necessarily a narrow specialist, trained for just one job. He was one of the inventors of a whole new theory of mechanics.

Why would that imply he wasn't a narrow specialist?

There is a very real sense that what he was a 'specialist' in was figuring out what's fundamental to all of physics - so not so narrow.

Well yeah but that is more of a coincidence that he happened to be a specialist in something with wide effects. QM had implications far beyond just those fundamentals, but I would imagine that he would not have known much about those fields that QM ended up having an effect on. For example, did he know much about optics, which was one of the fields most heavily affected by QM?

The widespread impact of your field and the specificity of actually working in your field are two very different things.

Coincidence?

Meaning that he happened to work on something that had widespread effect, he didn’t plan for it. It was luck that quantum mechanics was so successful

I think it is clear that Heisenberg, Sommerfeld, Born and others at the forefront of theoretical physics at the time were well aware of how important and far-reaching the issues that comprised Heisenberg's real work were.

As explained in the article, his diversion into hydrodynamics was purely to secure a doctorate from a physics establishment which had not yet caught up to this fact, and I would say that, if anything, it is this establishment which suffered a surfeit of narrow specializations.

That isn’t at all clear to me as a physicist

Are you a physicist?

So you think your being a physicist gives you special insight into whether Sommerfeld, Born and Heisenberg understood the significance of what they were working on? Explain.

Yes, of course. I am an expert in physics, you are not...

That's not an explanation, that's a rather trite attempt at an ad-hominem evasion. What (and how) does your exhaustive knowledge of physics allow you to conclude about how Sommerfeld, Born and Heisenberg viewed the significance of what they were working on, that you assume is not available to me? Use whatever physics is necessary to explain how you came to your position - I might know more than you assume.

I'm not convinced people fail PhD viva all the time.

It's only a real fail if they tell you to give up

Indeed in modern times you will know far in advanced whether or not you will pass

Traditionally that's the defense, not the oral qualifying exam.

These days, it is absolutely unheard of for someone to get a doctorate at age 21. I don't know whether it was unusual then.

Stephen Wolfram got it at age 20, in theoretical physics, from CalTech.

(OK, that's also 40+ years ago by now)

I'm not sure about unusual or not, but I believe it was (then and there) possible to start a doctorate right after graduating from high-school (if I remember correctly from a biography of J. von Neumann).

I know plenty “Industrie Dr.” 22 or 23 yo

This is nothing compared to S. Ramanujan.

The man, clearly a genius in mathematics, was also but merely mediocre in his Mathematics classes (and exams) at University. The struggle to be recognized for him must've been quite insane.

"So, you're telling me you're this math genius who can't even ace Math exams ? Yeahhhh right."

I dimly remember my high school math teacher telling us this was because he‘d just write down results without showing procedure, having done the necessary work in his head, but I may be conjuring that memory up.

"There is an interesting epilogue to this story. When Heisenberg derived the uncertainty relations several years later, he used the resolving power of the microscope to derive the uncertainty relations"

Loved this part. They are pretty much the same :)

I question if today’s hyper-agressive attitudes are any useful in Science, and, if they just don’t contribute to the toxicity that plagues Academia.

There are other ways to express disagreement, no?

It seems it’s just people discharging and inflicting their sadistic & abusive pus on - many times livelihood-insecure - others because the System enables them to.

Cool story. The most important aspect of it, in my view, is that the problem of 'deriving the resolving power of an optical system' is a very interesting one that inspired Heisenberg and Bohr! I speculate that the way Wien taught it was by rote, and not fully understood, even by Wien.

A Turing Award winner (keeping it anonymous) related a similar story to me about his phd qualifier exam (when I was taking mine). This winner is a theoretical computer scientist who skipped most of his computer hardware courses. Near the time of his graduation, he was informed that he needed to pass a hardware course because it was required for graduation.

He worried; his advisor begged the hw professor to give him an oral exam in place, because he was a promising candidate with a faculty job already lined up and incredible published results.

Unlike Wein, the hw professor was happy to oblige and created a basic oral exam, suspecting that the student was destined for greatness.

The student desperately tried to cram the hw textbook, but his heart was simply not into the subject. He did however, get the main point of the entire field.

This is when the funny part of the story begins. If you know this person, you know that he is remarkably clever, charming and convincing. He tells me that the hw professor had prepared a small number of questions, all beginning with something like, "explain how a XXX works in a YYY architecture", and that he really didn't know any details of XXX.

He started by copying a basic diagram of a processor onto the board. He kept his answers short, he began each with quizzical look indicating that the question was obvious, and all answers included a remark along the lines of "Obviously, its for performance!" In some cases, while facing the professor, he would point backwards to a spot between components in the diagram. He would slowly move his finger to different areas based on the look on the professor's face.

The hw professor was amused and obviously passed the candidate!

TLDR: don't let classes get in the way of your education.

This is not classes getting in a way of education. It is an university breaking its own rules and making special exceptions for an individual.

Some school systems do it a lot, others rarely. But generally, the one that don't do this tend to be better overall.

Brilliant! There are good people in the world after all!

Nice story, except the TLDR.

it's a Mark Twain reference fwiw

> Accustomed to being always at the top of his class, Heisenberg found it hard to accept the lowest of three passing grades for his doctorate

What part of "passing grade for his doctorate" did he not understand? And certainly it's not entirely bad to learn how to deal with something less than complete success occasionally.

But it seems to me like he correctly optimized his efforts. If he had scored higher, it would have meant that he had wasted time and effort that could have been better spent working on things he was actually interested in – like his eponymous uncertainty principle.

Not so much sad, but rather ignorant. Heisenberg knew that an experimental physicist would sit on the panel. What kind of questions did he expect to get asked?

In those days, the expectation for a physics PhD was to be well-versed in different branches of the art. Think of this as you may, but it seems like Heisenberg simply didn’t prepare properly.

Let's have some fun. Here's a basic special relativity problem from John R. Taylor's Classical Mechanics.

A space explorer A sets off at a steady 0.95c to a distant star. After exploring the star for a short time, he returns at the same speed and gets home after a total absence of 80 years (as measured by earth-bound observers.) How long do A's clocks say that he was gone, and by how much has he aged as compared to his twin B who stayed behind on earth? [Note: This is the famous "twin paradox." It is fairly easy to get the right answer by judicious insertion of a factor of γ in the right place, but to understand it, you need to recognize that it involves three inertial frames: the earth-bound frame S, the frame S' of the outbound rocket, and the frame S'' of the returning rocket. Write down the time dilation formula for the two halves of the journey and then add. Notice that the experiment is not symmetrical between the two twins: B stays at rest in the single inertial frame S, but A occupies at least two different frames. This is what allows the result to be unsymmetrical.]

Hint: thinking about what happens when the acceleration changes makes this problem more straightforward

ChatGPT says:

The time dilation formula tells us that the time experienced by a moving clock will appear slower to a stationary observer by a factor of $\gamma$, where $\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}}$ and $v$ is the speed of the moving clock and $c$ is the speed of light. In this case, the speed of the space explorer's rocket is 0.95c, so $\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - 0.95^2}} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{0.0025}} \approx 7.071$.

To determine how long the space explorer's clocks say that he was gone, we need to apply the time dilation formula to each half of the journey. Since the speed of the rocket is the same on the way out as it is on the way back, the value of $\gamma$ will be the same in both cases.

First, let's consider the outbound leg of the journey. From the perspective of an observer on Earth, this journey takes 40 years. However, from the perspective of the space explorer, the time experienced on the outbound leg of the journey will be slower by a factor of $\gamma$, so the time experienced by the space explorer on this leg of the journey will be 40 years / $\gamma$ = $\frac{40}{7.071} \approx 5.648$ years.

Now let's consider the inbound leg of the journey. From the perspective of an observer on Earth, this journey also takes 40 years. However, from the perspective of the space explorer, the time experienced on the inbound leg of the journey will also be slower by a factor of $\gamma$, so the time experienced by the space explorer on this leg of the journey will be 40 years / $\gamma$ = $\frac{40}{7.071} \approx 5.648$ years.

To determine the total time experienced by the space explorer, we need to add the time experienced on the outbound leg of the journey to the time experienced on the inbound leg of the journey. This gives us a total time experienced by the space explorer of 5.648 years + 5.648 years = 11.296 years.

To determine the difference in aging between the space explorer and their twin who stayed on Earth, we need to multiply the time experienced by the space explorer by $\gamma$. This gives us a difference in aging of 11.296 years * $\gamma$ = 11.296 years * 7.071 = 79.8 years. This means that the space explorer has aged 79.8 years less than their twin who stayed on Earth.

Wow. It's amazing that if you had not said this was ChatGPT Inwoukd have thought "he's clever I should read it and learn something". However with the caveat there, I don't at all want to read and learn because I have no idea if it is correct or in what ways or direction it is misleading.

I simply cannot trust it.

ChatGPT is like one of the stone statues guarding a mythical treasure - one of them always lies and one always tells the truth. But they do speak full and coherent sentences and they sound convincing.

This does lead I guess to the point - maybe we are ChatGPT engines underneath but use some form of listening to the words and trying to build a real working model that can be tested and predicted.

Without any background in general relativity at all I can see that it got the basic arithmetic wrong in the last paragraph. Presumably the answer is about 69 years if the math in the precedence paragraphs is correct.

Interesting article. We would see more contributios from him had he taken the offer of James Franck. Even probably a different view on the matters.

I think sad may be the wrong lens to look at this through. It obviously prepared him for large amounts of success in his career.

They were uncertain whether to give him a pass?

So he was both a genius and a dimwit at the same time. Meta state superposition - Typical Heisenberg.

Really puts Heisenberg in context. No wonder he seems so bitter.

I didn't know Prof. Wien had a HN account.

My comment was actually a sort of Dad Joke based on Breaking Bad, not a slap at Werner Heisenberg the physicist.

"oral exam" sounds funny. I can't help but imagine a person (whom I visualize as Bryan Cranston for obvious reason) examining someone with their mouth or having their mouth examined :-]

It's how it's described in the UK system, so you get people taking their "French orals" which always sounded funny to me.

When I was in school, all of my teachers referred to language listening exams (a tape is played, you have a sheet of questions to answer) as "aural" which mirrors calling the spoken exams "orals". Having not heard the word before, I could barely even tell the words apart when mentioned.

People don't say viva any more? For viva voce. I must be getting old.

Are all oral exams vivas? My (distant, secondhand) impression was that it was mostly used for the thesis defense.

Well the original topic was Heisenberg's doctoral defence. And yes, it is mostly use for that even though the term itself is quite general.

It's how it is in the US as well.

Hes correct. It should be "verbal exam".

No, oral is more clear. We also say something is an oral tradition not a verbal tradition because one of the definitions of oral is “Spoken rather than written.”

One of the mean songs for Verbal is “Of, relating to, or associated with words.” So a written test could be a verbal test.

“verbal” can be applied to either spoken or written word, but I get the sense that people default to “verbal” over “oral” just out of discomfort.

'Oral' is also ambiguous. 'Vocal' might be better than either, though it sounds awkward, perhaps simply because it is not used.

Then there's 'interrogation', which Heisenberg might have concurred with...

No, verbal contrasts with written, as in verbal instructions versus written instructions. Is English your first language?

Yes, first and effectively only.

First definition at MW:

> of, relating to, or consisting of words

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verbal

https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/are-verbal-agreements-legally-...

> When two or more parties come to an agreement without any written documentation, they create a verbal agreement (known formally as an oral contract).

I think that alone demonstrates that verbal contrasts with written.

The fact that many people use it in opposition to written is insufficient proof that all dictionaries are wrong. Eventually it may only mean oral, but today it doesn’t.

In fact, though, it's "oral exam." But it does sound funny.

language, in fact, evolves. a rectal exam involves examining the examining the rectal cavity, so a oral exam should be reserved for examining the oral cavity.

I agree in general, but disagree on the details. In an oral exam, a student answers questions orally. That's how language has evolved so far. I can't imagine a situation where a committee of professors would need to examine a granduate student's rectum to evaluate knowledge, so the "rectal exam" above is poorly named. To further advance linguistic evolution, "rectal exam" should be reserved for occasions when the student is required to pronounce words rectally in response to questions in his or her field of study.

That happens more often than you might think, plus it makes everything consistent.

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