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But why did Planck make use of Boltzmann’s “unrealistic” chunking of energies? Did he overlook the part in the 1877 paper where Boltzmann made it clear that he was using discrete energies only to make his methodology easier to understand? How did Boltzmann’s unrealistic discrete energies become Planck’s quantized energy elements? Planck himself could not answer these questions. It is not uncommon in physics to use a placeholder in an equation to make an equation match experimental evidence, and it’s done on the understanding that the placeholder is simply a temporary device to be used until scientists can figure out what the placeholder really stands for.

Heisenberg, Pauli and Dirac travelled back and forth between the two institutions, all of them spending time with both Bohr in 19 T h e Q u a n t u m Te n Copenhagen and Born at Göttingen. Only those who were privy to what was really going on in the two research centres knew about the friction and personal animosities playing out behind the scenes. To the rest of the physics community, the Copenhagen and Göttingen collaborators presented a facade of unity and harmony. They knew it made their version of the new physics stronger if it looked as if they were all singing from the same songbook.

By then, both Dirac and an Italian scientist had come up with the same idea and sent their work off for publication, while Jordan’s paper lay at the bottom of one of Born’s suitcases. Born still felt sick about the damage he feared he’d done to the young man’s career. Ehrenfest also knew that Born was still hurt by the souring of his long friendship with Einstein. They were both scientists; they should have been able to get past their ideological differences about quantum physics. In Born’s opinion, Einstein had turned his back on the struggling Copenhagen and Göttingen physicists right when they were lost in a quantum wilderness and just when the “true believers,” as they considered themselves, needed their leader and standard bearer.