Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

whether light is a particle or a wave. The second is the quantum
leap: How could something move from A to B without ever
having been in the middle? Eventually, Bohr’s assistant, Werner
Heisenberg, discovered a way to mathematically account for the
strange quantum behavior of the atom. In some cases, however, his
Heisenberg’s theory also had another strange feature:
. Because of the mathematical form of the
theory, there would be pairs of observable properties—for example,
position and momentum—such that when you observe the value for
one, the other ceases to have a value. This came to be known as
the : For these pairs of measurable
quantities, there is a limit to how precisely we can know the values
of both. The more exactly we measure one, the more uncertain we
are about the other.
In quantum mechanics, this is not a feature of our knowledge or lack
of knowledge but a feature of the universe itself. When an object
It’s not just that we don’t know it; it’s that the object ceases to have
a single value for that property.
The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed a way to do
a simple equation that resembled the equation for the conservation
of energy. It was now easy to calculate the behavior of a system
over time, but there was a problem.
Every physical theory has what are called —
important measurable quantities that the theory connects. In
Newton’s theory, if you’re given the position, mass, velocity,
and acceleration of each ball on a pool table, you can know
the exact values for each at any point in the future. Those
are the state variables, and the theories determine how they
change over time.
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