What a pleasant way to spend Christmas Day, reading debate on the philosophy of physics. My two cents, rushing where angels fear, is that the
HUP was wrongly interpreted as a refutation of
Laplace's Demon, the claim
Quote:
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We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
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Heisenberg was the first to show that this problem is in principle insoluble for science because of the observer effect. However, it is entirely wrong to say that because we cannot know the position and direction of a particle, that the particle does not actually have a unique position and momentum. It is just that we finite creatures cannot know it. People often equate truth with knowledge, whereas
Warren's point here, as I read him, is that truth is a noumenal reality independent of human knowledge. Heisenberg did
not show that the universe is indeterministic, only that it is indeterministic for science.
Heisenberg is pulled over by a policeman whilst driving down a motorway, the policeman gets out of his car, walks towards Heisenberg's window and motions with his hand for Heisenberg to wind the window down, which he does. The policeman then says ‘Do you know what speed you were driving at sir?', to which Heisenberg responds ‘No, but I knew exactly where I was.