This article, One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead, gives an interesting summary of one important aspect of what is called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
[T]he uncertainty principle comes in two superficially similar formulations that even many practicing physicists tend to confuse. Werner Heisenberg’s own version is that in observing the world, we inevitably disturb it. And that is wrong, as a research team at the Vienna University of Technology has now vividly demonstrated.
Led by Yuji Hasegawa, the team prepared a stream of neutrons and measured two spin components simultaneously for each, in direct violation of Heisenberg’s version of the principle. Yet, the alternative variation continued to hold.
What is this other formulation of the Uncertainty Principle which is only superficially similar to Heisenberg’s formulation?
The same year [as when Heisenberg proposed his Uncertainty Principle], Earle Kennard, a less-known physicist, derived a different formulation, which was later generalized by Howard Robertson: s(q)s(p) >= h/4pi. This inequality says that you cannot suppress quantum fluctuations of both position s(q) and momentum s(p) lower than a certain limit simultaneously. The fluctuation exists regardless whether it is measured or not, and the inequality does not say anything about what happens when a measurement is performed. [I’ve had to modify the equations, replacing symbols, as I’ve not yet learned how to handle equations in html or its derivatives and don’t plan on learning how to do so any time soon.]
I’m still in the process of learning some of the technical aspects of quantum theory. I think a serious understanding of those technical aspects will lead to more disciplined ways of writing and speaking about some particular aspects of the concrete forms of created being which, so to speak, came boiling out of the complex events simplistically labeled the Big Bang. I learned my basic views of quantum physics first as prejudices which were not well supported by serious knowledge, but I learned my prejudices from men who understood quantum physics, sometimes as physicists and sometimes as philosophers and sometimes as both. I can still recall Fr. Stanley Jaki, the Benedictine polymath who had a doctorate in physics in addition to the more traditional degrees of a Catholic priest, standing in front of a group in a large meeting-room at UMass Amherst and telling us that the Uncertainty Principle was unbeatable because it was a basic principle of being in this universe and not a problem of measurement inaccuracies due to disturbing the entity being measured. I can’t remember him saying more than that to that gathering of scientifically literate non-physicists. I can’t even testify that I remember his words accurately, but I remember the clear gist of what he said and Fr. Jaki was a man with an irritable manner when it came to matters of principle in theology and science alike. But my taste in `popular’ science also runs to books written by highly-regarded scientists writing for other scientists from other specialties as well as scientifically literate laymen.
So it is that I have understood for a couple of decades that there is an uncertainty principle which deals with more fundamental issues than the disturbance of an entity during a measurement process. This doesn’t mean I was clear it was separate from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but I knew something substantial about the issue.
In my currently clumsy terms:
A quantum entity, described in terms of a wavefunction, has a coherent set of aspects which we think of in terms of position and momentum. Position is a particle-type property, momentum is a wave-type property. By the very nature of a wave, its attributes are found over the entire region of what can simplistically be called its region of vibration. This means that momentum can seemingly be understood as a wavefunction aspect and position as an aspect of a concrete thing and that means we don’t really understand either aspect.
I’d hardly be original in claiming this tells us that the `wavefunction’ stuff is defined by groups of aspects which don’t quite correspond to this concrete level of thing-like stuff, which is particle-like to our perceptions though we know of things such as vibrating drum-heads. That level described by wavefunctions is a more abstract level of being, in my way of speaking. This means that there are some more abstract properties in that more abstract realm of being in which wavefunctions can be found, so to speak, and when shaped to a more concrete form, these properties show up as the properties of matter-energy, fields, and — in some way not yet apparent from gravitational theories, spacetime. That is, those more abstract properties can be shaped to the more concrete properties described so well in classical physics. This points to some confusion — quantum physics first developed because what I’m calling “more abstract” realms of being have direct effects in this “more concrete” realm. Those abstract forms of being down just disappear in favor of more concrete forms of being, they continue to exist in the most thing-like of things.
The abstract realms of being, including even the realm of truths manifested by God as the basic stuff of created being, are present in this universe which seems to first perceptions to be so concrete. In fact, this universe seems so concrete that many thinkers, and many non-thinkers as well, have tried to explain the immaterial aspects of this universe by positing immaterial substances, explaining what I see as human relationships to the various entities and relationships of this universe by positing some mind-stuff or soul-stuff.
I’ve written often of this and will refer the reader to a weblog entry from last September: From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives. This essay provides a very simplified overview of my view of being and a simple comparison to the view of being of Plato and the naive view held by working scientists during their 9-5 moments.
After a little contemplation, most thinkers with any scientific literacy will understand that I’m making obvious the way in which science works, moving up to the more abstract to develop more powerful concepts and skills and then moving down to apply what has been learned to the concrete world. At the same time, I’m recommending that this process can be used across fields, not to make political science a branch of physics but rather to allow political scientists to acquire some potentially useful concepts and skills. Even more importantly, I’m claiming this process of movement from concrete to abstract levels and back again is a true reflection of the nature of created being and not just a human intellectual strategy.
Returning more strictly to the specific subject of this essay, I’m suggesting physicists have one foot in the concrete world of momentum-location of a classical sort, one foot in a more abstract world in which they formally use wave-like attributes such as momentum and particle-like attributes such as location and don’t quite know how to translate these formalisms into an appropriate understanding of momentum-location in our concrete universe. Several years back, I wrote about this topic in the short essay, Shaping Our Minds to Reality. Here is the entire short essay which starts with a quote from a book written by a man both theoretical physicist and Anglican priest:
Shaping Our Minds to Reality [originally published on 2007/11/23]
The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has to take on the atomic scale and below. Anyone who has had to teach a mathematically based subject will know the difficulties which students encounter in negotiating a new level of abstraction. They have met the idea of a vector as a crude arrow. You now explain to them that it is better thought of as an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. ‘But what is it really?’ they say. You implore them to believe that it is an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. They do not believe you; they think that you are holding back some secret clue that would make it all plain. Time and experience are great educators. A year later the student cannot conceive why he had such difficulty and suspicion about the nature of vectors. Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality. If we are indeed in such a digestive, living-with-it, period, it would explain something which is otherwise puzzling. A great many theoretical physicists would be prepared to express some unease about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics — in particular, about Copenhagen orthodoxy — but only a tiny fraction of them ever direct serious attention to such questions. Perhaps the majority are right to submit themselves to a period of subliminal absorption. [The Quantum World, J.C. Polkinghorne, Princeton Science Library, 1989, page 82]
J.C. Polkinghorne was from the group of theoretical physicists at Cambridge which also included Stephen Hawking. He quickly became a Professor, which is not the same as Professor at an American university but rather somewhat the same as a holder of an endowed professorship. Around 1980, when he was still young, he heard God calling and entered a seminary to become an Anglican priest, returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator after ordination. He’s a clearheaded thinker in the domains of science and theology.
I just want to emphasize the importance of what Polkinghorne is saying from his personal experience in learning and in educating young scientists. I may well go further than he would support.
We do not come into this life with brains which are some sort of wetware general processors. We don’t really process information in the way of a computer or a communications channel. We handle information by reshaping ourselves to what we find when we actively engage what lies around us. Like a totemic hunter making himself one with the bear he hunts, we shape ourselves in some substantial ways to what we find and we can only find what we seek. Learning, in the general and academic senses, is an active process and, moreover, a process in which the mind itself is altered rather than just having new content loaded in. The hunter doesn’t think he can become one with the bear by imagining a bear which accords with his preconceptions. He learns how bears behave over his years as a boy and then begins to think as if he were a bear. The astrophysicist doesn’t think — not for long in any case — to become one with the Milky Way by building a galaxy as if using an erector set. He studies how the universe really is for many years and shapes his mind around the reality that he perceives. When the hunter begins to understand the bear or the astrophysicist the galaxy, then he can begin to enter the story of that entity, to travel along with it through time.
It all begins with a suspension of conscious efforts, a suspension of the will, that the mind, and perhaps other parts of that human being, can be reshaped to accord with reality. You’ve got to be willing to learn the rules of the game rather than thinking you’re entering some sort of game for which you have inborn knowledge of the rules as well as inborn skills that only need the developing. We have inborn knowledge of the general rules of this world, very general skills of the sort needed to function in this world. That’s all.
Polkinghorne raises an issue not addressed by St. Thomas Aquinas so far as I know:
Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.
This process has already gone on for three generations or so in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that there are some reshapings of the human mind so radical that it takes generations to build the foundations before the building can even rise? Or is it just that few there are willing to accept reality especially in an age where we’ve deluded ourselves to believe we’re born as some sort of fully formed `persons’? How can we be reshaped if we’re already fully formed? How can we need reshaping to suit ourselves for lives as hunters or scientists or God-centered human beings if we’re autonomous agents who merely make decisions or consume knowledge or experiences the way we think to consume toothpaste?
Additional Comments
I don’t really have a lot to add except the suggestion that scientists might have headed off-track on dealing with this problem. They perhaps need to ascend to a higher level of abstraction than even that wavefunction of quantum mechanics. Arguably, they are doing so in string theory and superstring theory and awesome string theory or whatever, but there’s little evidence so far that they’ve made progress in the basics — strings do allow some tentative understanding of the different masses of some particles otherwise the same. That’s an important problem but string theory seems to be generating more fancy equations than insights.
Anyway, my goal is merely to raise the issue of proper abstraction when we encounter conundrums such as those faced by modern quantum theorists. I don’t think much real progress will be made until a Newton or an Einstein arises, one who sets out accepting reality rather than trying to explain it away with too many well-formed, but ultimately questionable, assumptions about the nature of that reality. Then some of the conundrums might be restated as an acceptance of reality along with a statement of what truly needs to be dealt with by creative minds. The most powerfully creative mind will merely be idling at a high rate if it’s trying to answer a question raised by the sudden emergence of a new level of being and trying to answer that question in terms of being as understood before this interesting surprise.