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This explains why, despite all attempts to disprove Hume's philosophy, scientific thought has not broken away from its alpha and omega in the slightest degree. A proof of this is to be found, for example, in the principle of Indeterminacy which has arisen in modern physics.
The conception of Indeterminacy as an unavoidable consequence of the latest phase of physical research is due to Professor W. Heisenberg. Originally this conception forced itself upon Heisenberg as a result of experimental research. In the meantime the same idea has received its purely philosophical foundation. We shall here deal with both lines of approach.
When he had debated the subject years before, the experience of reading had come down to an indeterminacy that left out the possibility of conclusive understanding. This disappointed many of his undergraduates, but then, reality was more often than not a disappointment.
Moreover, as Eddington shows, the question whether the optical contrivance 'sorts out' from the chaotic light a particular periodicity, or whether it 'impresses' this on the light, becomes just 'a matter of expression'.11 So here, too, the modern investigator is driven to a resigned acknowledgment of the principle of Indeterminacy.
Indeterminacy, as we have just seen it explained by Schrödinger, is nothing but the exact continuation of Humean scepticism. The Country that is Not Ours
This, then, is the principle of Indeterminacy as it has been encountered in the course of practical investigation into the electrical processes within physical matter. In the following way Professor Schrödinger, another leading thinker among modern theoretical physicists, explains the philosophical basis for the principle of Indeterminacy, which scientists have established in the meantime:1
Heisenberg's name has become known above all by his formulation of the so-called Principle of Indeterminacy. 2 See, in this respect, Faust's dispute with Mephistopheles on the causes responsible for the geological changes of the earth. 3 See also Eddington's more elaborate description of this fact in his New Pathways in Science.
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