David Peat

Quantum Uncertainty 17in the early decades of the twentieth century was anticipating what hasbecome known as postmodernism and “the death of the author.”Earlier ideas of literature held that a book or poem has an objectivequality; it holds the meanings created by the author, and the readerhas the responsibility to tease out these meanings during the act ofreading. When at school we read a play by Shakespeare or analyzed apoem by Milton, we were told to uncover the various images, metaphors,and figures of speech that act as clues to the underlying meaningintended by the author.The postmodern approach suggests that reading is more of a creativeact in which readers create and generate meanings out of theirown experience and history of reading. Likewise the author writeswithin the context of the whole history of literature and the multipleassociations of language. Hence the author is no longer the final voiceof authority, the true “onlie begetter.” The reader is no longer just thepassive receiver of information but the one who gives the text its life.When Einstein spoke of the Good Lord he had in mind a notion ofauthorship similar to that of an earlier period; that is, of someone similarto the author of a Victorian novel. God had created the universe outof nothing and we, as its creatures, could come to understand the divinepattern of creation. Such a pattern was objective and existed independentof our thoughts, wishes, and desires. The extent to which thispattern remained veiled from us was a measure of our human limitationsas readers of the divine book of creation.Bohr and his colleagues in Copenhagen adopted a position closeto that of the postmodern reader. The “properties” of the electron arenot objective and independently existing, but arise in the act of observationitself. Without this act of observation, or creative “reading,” the“properties” of an electron could not be said to exist as such. This wasthe origin of the real break between Bohr and Einstein.Einstein had argued against the notion of absolute chance inquantum theory, although he was ultimately willing to admit that aquantum observation does disturb the universe in an unpredictableway and that the radioactive decay of a nucleus may be totally unpredictable.But he could never give up his belief that the universe has a