Quantum Living - Part Eight - The Loss of Certainty

QUANTUM REALITIES

Wernher Hiesenberg was responsible for expressing some stranger aspects of the quantum theory.

As the quantum properties of energy and matter were explored, it was found that the effects were not deterministic, as Newtonian thinking would have it. The quantum effects were probabilistic; that is, based on patterns of randomness. Particles which ought to move either one way or another were being found to move BOTH ways!

This absurd sort of result was, of course, thought to be the result of measurement error. The response of those in the old paradigm when presented contrary evidence is always, at first, some form of denial. Even Albert Einstein commented "God does not play dice with the world."

It was determined, however, that some form of 'dice' is exactly what was going on. Heisenberg was able to show, through the development of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that a basic property of quantum particles, the building blocks of all matter, is the supreme un-knowability of their speed and direction. Fundamentally, one or the other may be known - if so, the other cannot be known; it is affected inescapably by the process of the measurement. We change the world through the process of observing it.

The world of Newton was shattered forever, except as an illusion that we maintain due to the inadequacy of our senses. We cannot see the quantum world directly; we infer it from painstaking laboratory work and from the things we build that work.

When Planck and Heisenberg are taken together, they show that the smallest particles of matter do not have a continuous objective existence. They exist as probabilities which wink in and out of our universe each nanosecond or so, moving from 100% here to 100% in some other dimension - or so it is thought. Figuring this out is a puzzle that will take us many more decades.

When we finally get a full grasp on the nature of substance - of ourselves, for that matter - it will require a completely new philosophy of being if we are to integrate it into everyday thinking, in the way we have integrate Newton's mechanics into our daily life.