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Although the full significance of Heisenberg's remarks on Goethe will become apparent only at a later stage of our discussion, they have been quoted here because they form part of the symptom we wish to characterize.
"You're crazy," gasped McLaurin. "I'm crazy, everything's gone crazy." Kendall roared with sudden, joyous laughter. "Absolutely. Everything goes crazy the laws of nature break down! Heisenberg's principle showed that the law of cause and effect weren't absolute. We've made them absolutely uncertain!" "But but motors talking, instruments giving lectures "
Ishie took his time answering, and when he did his words come slowly. "Ah, yes. Confusor it is. I was attempting to confound Heisenberg's statement; but instead I think between us we have confused the issue. "Heisenberg said that there was no certainty in our measurement of the exact orbit of an electron.
We find it associated with phenomena which, in Professor Heisenberg's words, expose their mutual connexions to exact mathematical thinking more readily than do any other facts of nature; and yet the way in which these phenomena have become known has played fast and loose with mathematical thinking to an unparalleled degree.
Only this much may be pointed out immediately, that Goethe if not in the scientific then indeed in the poetical part of his writings did fulfil what Heisenberg rightly feels to have been his true task.2 We mentioned Heisenberg's speech as a symptom of a certain tendency, characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically its own epistemological foundations.
Then Kendall looked at them for a long moment, then he sighed gently and threw them into a file cabinet. Heisenberg's Uncertainty. He'd reduced the thing to a form that simply told him it was beyond the limits of certainty and he ran it into the normal, natural uncertainty inevitable in Nature. Anyway he had real work to do now. The machine was about ready for his attention.
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.
A few years previous to Heisenberg's speech, the need of such a survey found an eloquent advocate in the late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations'.
So far," he added bitterly, "all I've gotten as an answer is a single expression that simply means practical zero Heisenberg's Uncertainty Expression." "I'm uncertain as to your meaning" McLaurin smiled "but I take it that's nothing new." "No. Nearly four centuries old twentieth century physics. I'll have to try some other line of attack, I guess, but that did seem so darned right.
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