God save us from unwarranted uses of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle!

Has any concept from physics been more abused and imported into more inappropriate settings since, well, Einstein’s idea of relativity?

Granted that picking on Deepak Chopra seems a little like shooting fish in a barrel, but still…

When Heisenberg first presented it to Einstein, he made the famous remark “I don’t believe God would play dice with the Universe.” More recently Stephen Hawking made the statement, “not only does God play dice with the Universe, sometimes throws the dice where you cannot find them.”

In essence, every act of observation transforms the Universe. Since observation cannot happen without interpretation, every interpretation becomes a reality. For us Human Beings, this has enormous implications, because we are linguistically programmed. Language does not describe, it creates. It conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes reality. Many times in many conversations, even with intimate friends, I have found myself in a quandary because we were using the same words but they meant different things to us. On looking up the dictionary, I found we were both right! Freud remarked “neurosis is the inability to tolerae ambiguity and ambivalence.” Our current need for certitude as a society may be an indication of our collective neurosies where we always want to see things as black or white, right and wrong, etc.

Despite being aware of this, I find myself constantly falling into the habit of certitude.

So, becuase subatomic particles defy the simultaneous determination of their position and velocity it therefore follows that the world is constructed by language and therefore…er, Bush is bad? Yeah, that’s the ticket!