PB Einstein never really liked it, even until the day he died, did he? Heisenberg:I saw Einstein in Princeton a few months before his death. We discussed quantum theory through one whole afternoon, but we could not agree on the interpretation. He agreed about the experimental tests of quantum mechanics, but he disliked the interpretation. DP I felt that at some point there was a slight divergence between your views and Bohr 's, although together you are credited with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg:That is quite true, but the divergence concerned more the method by which the interpretation was found than the interpretation itself. My point of view was that, from the mathematical scheme of quantum mechanics, we had at least a partial interpretation, inasmuch as we can say, for instance, that those eigenvalues which we determine are the energy values of the discrete stationary states, or those amplitudes which we determine are responsible for the intensities of the emitted lines, and so on. I believed it must be possible, by just extending this partial interpretation, to get to a complete interpretation. Following this way of thinking, I came to the uncertainty relations. Now, Bohr had taken a different starting-point. He had started with the dualism between waves and particles - the waves of Schrödinger and the particles in quantum mechanics - and tried, from this dualism, to introduce the term complementarity, which was sufficiently abstract to meet the situation. At first we both felt there was a real discrepancy between the two interpretations, but later we saw that they were identical. For three or four weeks there was a real difference of opinion between Bohr and myself, but that turned out to be irrelevant. DP Did this have its origin in your different philosophical approaches? Heisenberg: That may be. Bohr's mind was formed by pragmatism to some extent, I would say. He had lived in England for a longer period and discussed things with British physicists, so he had a pragmatic attitude which all the Anglo-Saxon physicists had. My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. This gives a different attitude. Bohr was perhaps somewhat surprised that one should finally have a very simple mathematical scheme which could cover the whole field of quantum theory. He would probably have expected that one would never get such a self-consistent mathematical scheme, that one would always be bound to use different concepts for different experiments, and that physics would always remain in that somewhat vague state in which it was at the beginning of the 1920s. DP In the interpretation you gave at that time, you seemed to imply that there did exist an ideal path and that somehow the act of measuring disturbed the path. This is not quite the same as the interpretation that you hold now, is it? Heisenberg:I will say that for us, that is for Bohr and myself, the most important step was to see that our language is not sufficient to describe the situation. A word such as path is quite understandable in the ordinary realm of physics when we are dealing with stones, or grass, etc., but it is not really understandable when it has to do with electrons. In a cloud chamber, for instance, what we see is not the path of an electron, but, if we are quite honest, only a sequence of water droplets in the chamber. Of course we like to interpret this sequence as a path of the electron, but this interpretation is only possible with restricted use of such words as position and velocity. So the decisive step was to see that all those words we used in classical physics - position, velocity, energy, temperature, etc. - have only a limited range of applicability. The point is we are bound up with a language, we are hanging in the language. If we want to do physics, we must describe our experiments and the results to other physicists, so that they can be verified or checked by others. At the same time, we know that the words we use to describe the experiments have only a limited range of applicability. That is a fundamental paradox which we have to confront. We cannot avoid it; we have simply to cope with it, to find what is the best thing we can do about it.