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'Why is Maxwell’s Theory so hard to understand?' - an essay by Freeman Dyson on how Maxwell's theory brought a sea-change (or perhaps I should say paradigm shift) to physics:

https://www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/DysonFreemanArticle.p...

In the penultimate paragraph, he writes "For example, the Schrödinger wave-function is expressed in a unit which is the square root of an inverse cubic meter. This fact alone makes clear that the wave-function is an abstraction, for ever hidden from our view. Nobody will ever measure directly the square root of a cubic meter." This has me wondering if there is a reason he could not have ended with "Nobody will ever measure directly the square root of an inverse cubic meter", other than that the as-written version makes the point just as well.



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