and his behaviour have been expressed, views that have been fervently, even passionately, held by a variety of individuals. It is as if, for some, the intense emotions unleashed by the unspeakable horrors of that war and regime have combined with the many ambiguities, dualities, and compromises of Heisenberg’s life and actions to makeHeisenberg himself subject to a type of uncertainty principle …’ Thomas Powers makes a similar point in his extraordinary and encyclopaedic book Heisenberg’s War , which first aroused my interest in the trip to Copenhagen; he says that Heisenberg’s later reticence on his role in the failure of the German bomb programme ‘introduces an element of irreducible uncertainty.’
Cassidy does not explore the parallel further. Powers even appends a footnote to his comment: ‘Forgive me.’ The apology seems to me unnecessary. It’s true that the concept of uncertainty is one of those scientific notions that has become common coinage, and generalised to the point of losing much of its original meaning. The idea as introduced by Heisenberg into quantum mechanics was precise and technical. It didn’t suggest that everything about the behaviour of particles was unknowable, or hazy. What it limited was the simultaneous measurement of ‘canonically conjugate variables’, such as position and momentum, or energy and time. The more precisely you measure one variable, it said, the less precise your measurement of the related variable can be; and this ratio, the uncertainty relationship, is itself precisely formulable.
None of this, plainly, applies directly to our observations of thought and intention. Thoughts are not locatable by pairs of conjugate variables, so there can be no question of a ratio of precision. Powers seems to imply that in Heisenberg’s case the uncertainty arises purely because ‘questions of motive and intention cannot be established more clearly than he was willing to state them.’ It’s true that Heisenberg was under contradictory pressures after the war which made it particularly difficult for him to explain what he had been trying to do. He wanted to distance himself from the Nazis, but he didn’t want to suggest that he had been a traitor. He was reluctant to claim to his fellow-Germans that he had deliberately lost them the war, but he was no less reluctant to suggest that he had failed them simply out of incompetence.
But the uncertainty surely begins long before the point where Heisenberg might have offered an explanation. Hewas under at least as many contradictory pressures at the time to shape the actions he later failed to explain, and the uncertainty would still have existed, for us and for him, even if he had been as open, honest, and helpful as it is humanly possible to be. What people say about their own motives and intentions, even when they are not caught in the traps that entangled Heisenberg, is always subject to question—as subject to question as what anybody else says about them. Thoughts and intentions, even one’s own—perhaps one’s own most of all—remain shifting and elusive. There is not one single thought or intention of any sort that can ever be precisely established.
What the uncertainty of thoughts does have in common with the uncertainty of particles is that the difficulty is not just a practical one, but a systematic limitation which cannot even in theory be circumvented. It is patently not resolved by the efforts of psychologists and psycho-analysts, and it will not be resolved by neurologists, either, even when everything is known about the structure and workings of the brain, any more than semantic questions can be resolved by looking at the machine code of a computer. And since, according to the so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics—the interconnected set of theories that was developed by Heisenberg, Bohr, and others in the twenties—the whole possibility of saying or thinking anything about the
Cassidy does not explore the parallel further. Powers even appends a footnote to his comment: ‘Forgive me.’ The apology seems to me unnecessary. It’s true that the concept of uncertainty is one of those scientific notions that has become common coinage, and generalised to the point of losing much of its original meaning. The idea as introduced by Heisenberg into quantum mechanics was precise and technical. It didn’t suggest that everything about the behaviour of particles was unknowable, or hazy. What it limited was the simultaneous measurement of ‘canonically conjugate variables’, such as position and momentum, or energy and time. The more precisely you measure one variable, it said, the less precise your measurement of the related variable can be; and this ratio, the uncertainty relationship, is itself precisely formulable.
None of this, plainly, applies directly to our observations of thought and intention. Thoughts are not locatable by pairs of conjugate variables, so there can be no question of a ratio of precision. Powers seems to imply that in Heisenberg’s case the uncertainty arises purely because ‘questions of motive and intention cannot be established more clearly than he was willing to state them.’ It’s true that Heisenberg was under contradictory pressures after the war which made it particularly difficult for him to explain what he had been trying to do. He wanted to distance himself from the Nazis, but he didn’t want to suggest that he had been a traitor. He was reluctant to claim to his fellow-Germans that he had deliberately lost them the war, but he was no less reluctant to suggest that he had failed them simply out of incompetence.
But the uncertainty surely begins long before the point where Heisenberg might have offered an explanation. Hewas under at least as many contradictory pressures at the time to shape the actions he later failed to explain, and the uncertainty would still have existed, for us and for him, even if he had been as open, honest, and helpful as it is humanly possible to be. What people say about their own motives and intentions, even when they are not caught in the traps that entangled Heisenberg, is always subject to question—as subject to question as what anybody else says about them. Thoughts and intentions, even one’s own—perhaps one’s own most of all—remain shifting and elusive. There is not one single thought or intention of any sort that can ever be precisely established.
What the uncertainty of thoughts does have in common with the uncertainty of particles is that the difficulty is not just a practical one, but a systematic limitation which cannot even in theory be circumvented. It is patently not resolved by the efforts of psychologists and psycho-analysts, and it will not be resolved by neurologists, either, even when everything is known about the structure and workings of the brain, any more than semantic questions can be resolved by looking at the machine code of a computer. And since, according to the so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics—the interconnected set of theories that was developed by Heisenberg, Bohr, and others in the twenties—the whole possibility of saying or thinking anything about the
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