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Werner Heisenberg nearly failed his 1923 PhD oral because he could not explain the resolving power of a microscope—or even how a storage battery worked. Experimental physicist Wilhelm Wien wanted to fail him, but his mentor Arnold Sommerfeld defended his brilliance as a theorist, securing a mediocre cum laude—four years before Heisenberg used a microscope thought experiment to explain the uncertainty principle.
1+ week, 1+ day ago (921+ words) Heisenberg's near-failed 1923 doctorate exposed his weakness in experimental physics, then the microscope returned in his 1927 explanation of quantum uncertainty....