The Uncertainty Principle:what can we count on?

The cone of uncertainty

The Uncertainty Principle: what can we count on?


In the sharp formulation of the law of causality-- "if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future"-it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.

--Werner Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927


I was watching, with open admiration, CJ Cregg, the fictional White House press secretary go through just one of her hectic days in acclaimed NBC TV series The West Wing, now in its 7th season. Of course, public relations people are paid to manage perception. They earn their keep most ably when they succeed despite operating from a rubber dingy bobbing about on a sea of variables. The multiplicity of practical issues to be juggled makes for a life of excitement punctuated by thrills and spills more appropriate to guerrilla warfare. That is why the somewhat mystical social sciences version of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: the very act of observing a phenomenon inevitably alters that phenomenon in some way resonates so well, particularly if you find yourself bailing water in the rubber dinghy of your own.

To be fair, Heisenberg (1901-1976), did not offer a view on how a particular thing can be known and understood. What he did say, in putting forth his Uncertainty Principle in 1927, was that two “conjugate variables” cannot both be measured precisely at the same time. Most famously, this pairing refers to position and momentum of a particle in the subatomic universe: if you pinpoint its position you can’t say much about its momentum and vice versa. Another popular pairing is time and energy: if you know how long it took to do something you haven’t the foggiest about how much energy went into doing it - or the other way around.

The implications of the Uncertainty Principle - of knowing all about one end of the stick only at the expense of giving up the ghost on the other, has had the scientific temperament experiencing a deep and unsettling trauma ever since Heisenberg’s formulation. After all, proof positive is thought to be axiomatic to science. Hypotheses, within the scientific context, are required to be prominently labelled and you don’t have to accept them till they are proved. And all else, particularly those ideas which call for belief or faith, transgress beyond the margins of scientific exactitude, and can be conveniently ignored. Einstein averred that even though he understood that Heisenberg could only measure one quantum variable precisely at a time, it didn’t go to prove that the other variables weren’t behaving in a perfectly measurable manner.

But who was Werner Heisenberg and why is his hypothesis the most talked about paper in physics even today? Perhaps it is because Werner is the father of quantum mechanics, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932, and headed the world’s first atomic bomb project for Hitler. He also formulated the principles of atomic fission along the way (1938). Because he didn’t succeed, detractors say it might have something to do with the pair called motivation and competence: if Heisenberg was keen on making the bomb for Hitler then he must have been incompetent or vice versa…

Chicanery apart, posterity can’t help but acknowledge Heisenberg as one of the world’s greatest theorists that revolutionised human understanding of the subatomic world. Still, many, including famous Swedish scientist and his senior colleague Niels Bohr, didn’t agree with Heisenberg’s uncertainty postulates. Others, eminent scientists themselves, are still unclear about what he meant. Albert Einstein’s abiding belief in scientific order made him retort that: “God does not play dice with the universe.” Perhaps he found the implications of inevitable vagueness in Heisenberg’s formulation threatening to the very concept of science. But Einstein did not fault Heisenberg’s reasoning: instead, he suggested that perhaps quantum mechanics was still “incomplete”.

But much later, Stephen Hawking, in “A Brief History of Time,” seemed to have no difficulty in accepting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, declaring that it only arises because you cannot observe a particle without disturbing it. And this is the precise connect with the social sciences interpretation that has been labelled inaccurate by some and banal by other commentators including Jim Holt who writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Washington Post website Slate.

To my mind, banality implies that it is a hackneyed truth viz: the very act of observing a phenomenon inevitably alters that phenomenon in some way : that it barely merits special mention. Is this perhaps an inadvertent admission, a Freudian slip, if you will? Or, have I misunderstood a disdainful dismissal as I scrabble to mine meaning when there was none intended? As for “inaccurate,” I always thought the social sciences were tolerated despite being “inexact” and so can’t see why one should go out of one's way to pick on Heisenberg’s principle.

Still, even as we must allow each intellectual his pirouetting space, it must be said that Dr. Heisenberg instinctively knew how to set the cat among the social science pigeons. Assess the resonance (as we wait for the outcome of the Bihar Assembly elections, for instance, which could start the comeback trail for the NDA combine in disarray at present but no more so than the Congress dishabille not so long ago, before the last general elections...), of this other innocent observation: "In chaos theory... the future of large and complex systems is unpredictable because it can be altered by small events.”

The Uncertainty Principle may be controversial and difficult to understand but did its author quietly demonstrate its efficacy for all to see? I mean did Heisenberg give the world a live demonstration by leaving questions unanswered on whether he deliberately scuttled the chances of the Nazi bomb - hanging in the air for over 30 years? This, even as he spent the post war years till his death in 1976 tirelessly working to give greater depth and coherence to the use of nuclear technology in Germany and conducting more research in quantum physics related to particles.

Maybe, Heisenberg proved his observations on Chaos Theory too while he was at it. To be sure it would have been a very different world today if he had delivered that first atomic bomb to Hitler! The future of a large and complex system may indeed have been very significantly altered in favour of the Third Reich. It was, after all, like Albert Speer’s buildings for Hitler, intended to last for “a thousand years” and not the three it actually did.

In the end, perhaps it is choice that makes all the difference to outcomes. Banal? Maybe. But, this is the case that Werner Heisenberg made with regard to “observation” in his uncertainty principle paper of 1927: I believe that the existence of the classical "path" can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it.

In a social sciences context, is he saying that if you can’t see your way clear then you can’t make any progress? Physics, after all, never had any quarrel with common sense.

(1,202 words)

Title: The Uncertainty Principle: what can we count on?

By Ghatotkach
Gurupurab, Tuesday, 15th November, 2005

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.