The Uncertainty Principle: - Harish Damodaran (best non fiction books to read txt) 📗

In short, at least in the subatomic world, You see things in the way You want to see them. Consciousness enters the scene. There is little scope for detached observers. They become out of fashion. The new trend is to regard you as Participators.

The message is clear:

Things appear a little different in the micro world.

Error in momentum means either to feel something that is not present or not to feel some thing actually present: A clear case of under/ over estimation.

Error in position means to see something that is actually not there. This is throwing the ball to the Philosopher’s court.

As a result, the theory of determinism crashes down and the share value for the causality falls.
By rejecting the material reality of atom, physicists entered the field of mystical perceptions. They actually hit upon one of the basic postulates of Vedanta, that the subjective shapes and decides the nature of the objective.

“Manodrusyamidam dvaitam, yat kinchit sa characharam
Manaso hyamanee bhaave dvaitam naivopalabhyate.....”
Mandukya karika… 31

(The world of duality that appears in the form of living or nonliving is nothing but a creation of mind because, at the cessation of mind, duality is not experienced.

)

Secondly, the idea of indeterminism- that the sure cause and effect relation does not apply to the quantum or subatomic world- had an equally startling effect on the world of science. Heisenberg challenged the notion of simple causality in nature, that every determinate cause in nature is followed by the resulting effect. Translated into ‘Classical Physics’, this had meant that the future motion of a particle could be exactly predicted, or ‘determined’, from a knowledge of its present position and momentum and all of the forces acting upon it. The uncertainty principle denies this, Heisenberg declared, because one cannot know the precise position and momentum of a particle at a given instant, so its future cannot be determined. One cannot calculate the precise future motion of a particle, but only a range of possibilities for the future motion of the particle.

In the sharp formulation of the law of causality-- "if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future"-it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.
--Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927

Whatever it is that we are observing can have a determinable momentum, and it can have a determinable position. But, of these two properties, we must choose, for any given moment, which one we wish to bring into focus. i.e., in reference to “moving particles”, we can never see them “the way they really are”, but only the way we choose to see them. “What we observe is not Nature itself, but Nature exposed to our method of questioning”.
The problem is more serious than it appears at the first sight. When it comes to the question of understanding, it becomes worse. To the question, “how can we understand the structure of atom?” Niels Bohr’s reply is immortal. “ …..we may yet be able to do so. But in the process, we may have to learn what the word understanding means”

Vedanta describes the ultimate creative power of the Universe as the primeval Energy Maya or Sakti, which is capable of making things happen in this relative world of space-time-causality without any cause. To quote Swami Vivekananda, “cause and effect are all Maya and we shall soon grow to understand that all we see is disconnected as the child’s fairy tales now seem to us. There is no such thing as cause and effect and we shall come to know of it. Then, if you can, lower your intellect to let any allegory pass through your mind without questioning about connection”.

Causality never pays…..

Whatsoever appear as causally connected are not so. Both Scientists and Vedantins are unanimous. The new science is on the verge of accepting the view,
“Maya mathramidam dvaitam….. “

In the New Science, even the concept of conception is affected. Bohr was once asked by a disgusted young scientist: “Where can the electron be said to be?” His reply is immortal: “To be? To be? To be? What does it mean, to be?”

If the New Science has led us any where, it is back to ourselves, which, of course, is the only

place we could go.

Publication Date: 11-14-2010

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