After discussing a use of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to understand the results of experiments in the fairly straightforward case of the polarization of light-waves and of individual photons, Alastair Rae speculates:
[If] we understood properly what the concepts of position and momentum mean on an atomic scale we might find it…illogical to possess definite values of these quantities simultaneously. [Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality, Alastair Rae, Cambridge University Press, Canto Edition, 1994, page 22]
The point to be made is more general and can be more understandable in light of one of the biggest errors that history records on the part of a brilliant thinker: Kant tried to turn his understanding of Newtonian dynamics into a metaphysically necessary system. In fact, Kant died thinking he’d succeeded in presenting physical reality as necessarily existing in a Euclidean three-space with an absolute and uniformly moving time dimension.
Einstein knew better not because of metaphysical reasoning but rather because he knew the literature of important experiments and he had a deep understanding of Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism. From there, using a minimum of a priori assumptions, he applied a small amount of mathematics and a lot of his intuition about the physical world to the evidence. To simplify more than a little, Einstein found that our physical environment seems to be a four-space with three dimensions of space and one of time. (Time retains its own properties as do the spatial dimensions, but they can bend each other in various sorts of interactions that can’t be explained so much as accepted as raw facts of how things are.) Einstein produced theories that would be eventually understood as telling us that matter creates that four-space and then shapes it. The American physicist John Wheeler told us that matter shapes space which then tells matter how to move.
We probably don’t have the best possible understanding of these matters but we have a better understanding than our ancestors who lived in those centuries without radio telescopes, those centuries during the slow maturing process of mathematics.
Philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers don’t make the best possible use of our modern empirical knowledge because they refuse to re-member what Aquinas told us: metaphysics uses the specific sciences. This isn’t a purely instrumental ‘uses’ but rather a fundamental interaction. Metaphysics truly is what its name implies: an abstraction from our empirical knowledge of physical reality, including the mathematics we develop as we explore that reality. Metaphysics isn’t just an ivory-tower activity. It’s our way of creating a language, including the words for complex concepts, that we might talk about reality.
God is multi-lingual. When He works to shape this universe and to tell the story I call a world, he speaks the languages of quantum physics and chemistry and chaos theory and biological evolution — including moral evolution. (See To See a World in a Grain of Sand for information on my first published book in which I develop a worldview in which this world is seen as the physical universe in light of the purposes of God.) When God creates from nothing, creating the basic stuff of this world and the world of the resurrected, He speaks the languages of transfinite set-theory and algorithmic complexity theory and metaphysics. Don’t take these analogies too seriously — they won’t bear up under much weight, but I do intend to point the reader towards a new view of the relationships between this universe and the more abstract foundation of Creation which I call the Primordial Universe. I intend to point towards a new view of the relationships between different fields of knowledge as well.
But not entirely new. Alastair Rae seems to have some substantial understanding of the possibilities. The elemental components of highly shaped thing-like reality are clearly different in some ways from those of the more basic levels of reality. Speaking very vaguely: the various elements of this universe must be derived in some sense from the elements of the Primordial Universe, but that doesn’t tell us immediately what those elements are or even what sorts of entities they might be. The underlying stuff of our thing-like universe are abstract and the difficulties in quantum mechanics come from our inability to understand how this abstract and well-determined stuff collapses to the concrete stuff of this universe, concrete stuff which seems to have some freedom not found in the underlying stuff.
Position and momentum aren’t metaphysically necessary parameters and aren’t even necessary — so far as we know — at the level at which quantum effects occur. At the same time, there is something corresponding to position which shows up when we try to measure position but in such a way as to destroy the possibility of measuring something corresponding to momentum at the same time. A crude analogy: when we look at copper ore, we shouldn’t expect to find all the attributes of finished copper piping and valves.
We live in exciting times and the open possibilities for human thought and action have unsettled us a little more in these turbulent times, these times when much is being destroyed in one way or another and the new societies and political structures and ways of viewing reality are but dream-like or nightmarish possibilities.
Modern man has piled up mountains of as-yet undigested empirical facts and theories. Many of these facts and theories are very disturbing, casting in doubt our post-Kantian intuitions that the sort of time and space that we experience are necessary foundations of any sort of reality, casting in doubt our traditional understandings of what numbers are and what logic are, casting in doubt our belief that there is an infinite chasm of sorts between us and other sorts of animals, casting in doubt much that gave us the illusion that we understood God’s Creation in certain important ways.
We have a chance to gain richer understandings of our human selves and our world and we act as if our greater empirical knowledge points towards some irrational world. Why? Because this greater empirical knowledge points towards towards a world which can’t be understood by our current stock of ideas. We’re too fearful and too lazy to try to develop ideas which can be used to understand our world which seems so much richer and stranger than Plato or Newton or even Einstein thought it to be. Only faith in God will allow us to surmount our own weaknesses and to act with the courage and creativity appropriate to our opportunities.