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Werner Heisenberg showed that it will
forever be impossible to know basic reality.
Because in attempting to see it, we necessarily change it.
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Werner Heisenberg showed that it will
forever be impossible to know basic reality.
Because in attempting to see it, we necessarily change it.
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Daniel Menaker (NYT Magazine) describes this in human terms:
The greatest impact of the uncertainty principle on the idea of the self comes not from its implications about free will and determinism, nor from its suggestion that we can never really know the world, but from its thesis that we can't know it because our very efforts to do so change and in a way corrupt the world we are trying to know.
When Heisenberg threw this stone of hard mathematical physics into the pool of philosophy, its ripples required us to see ourselves, each of our own selves, as interferers with whatever we run across.
Such ideas of the conscious human self as an automatic interferer, a changer, a polluter of reality, may have always been part of philosophy and even art, but it was Heisenberg who for the first time scientifically demonstrated that our very efforts fully to understand what surrounds us must defeat their own purpose.
