UNCERTAINTY IN THE AGE OF NEW SCIENCE

 

UNCERTAINTY IN THE AGE OF NEW SCIENCE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© October 20, 2020 

Henry writes


And let’s not overlook the Nazi Heisenberg, the “father” of quantum mechanics who alerted the need for heavy water, then produced in Norway, etc.

A general comment, it is not whatever -ism we sail under, it is the corruptibility of individuals. Ergo, we need to corruption-proof society. Any books about that?

My reply

True, Werner Heisenberg was one of the principle players in the incredible new field of physics in the early 20th century, along with several other German Sciences mentioned in a previous missive (i.e., “Why is hate such a powerful motivator?”). It is also true that he understood the critical need of “heavy water” in the creation of an atomic bomb, but beyond that it appears he wanders off into the ambivalence of the mythic of scientific intrigue.

When I was living and working in South Africa in 1968, often thumbing through scientific journals at my leisure, one day I came across Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle,” and although I commenced to write my novel of that time in South Africa in 1969 when I returned to the States, I would work on the novel off and on for next fifty years, finally publishing it in 2017. This is how one chapter of that novel opens:

THE PHYSICS OF UNCERTAINTY (from the novel, DEVLIN)

The Devlins had reached the point of irreconcilable differences in their marriage where little energy was left for explanation or protest. When Sarah and Rickie left with Marta Rogers and her daughters, the Devlins knew they wouldn’t see each other again until the sun rose on another day. Both were disinclined to say anything as surprise had worn out its welcome.

There was a time when Sarah resented Devlin’s routine of retiring into the sanctuary of his study after dinner to read, listen to classical music, to some mystery on the BBC, or simply to stare into the fireplace watching the timbers smolder drinking coffee until falling asleep with a book in his lap.

She had asked dutifully before leaving, “When will you be home?”

“Later,” he had replied.

“Then later it is,” she had said evenly. “We won’t wait dinner for you.”

It was amazing how civil people can be when the antipathy in the air is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

As he drove to Nina’s just past five o’clock, for no apparent reason, Devlin thought of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his “Uncertainty Principle.” The theory deals with quantum mechanics and subatomic particles in physics, but he could see how it could apply equally to people.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty deals with the position of the electron, its momentum, energy and time. The problem in applying these four variables to his situation was that there was no precise measurement of their properties. Imprecision dictated his dilemma. Here I am in the turmoil of apartheid only to see how pathetic my church is as a moral force, ask to do a job in a corporate universe motivated only by money, driven with limited energy by the inconceivable variable of time. What could be more uncertain?

The church blackmails me with the threat of deportation. What could be more absurd? Nothing. My gardener is murdered and his death is treated as inconsequential because he is a Bantu. What can I do about it? Nothing. I make police inquiries to understand the why to appease my soul and am blocked by police and society. What can I do about it? Nothing.

Clearly, Asabi (house maid) had affection for Josiah. She spoke his language and came from the same homeland, and I’m sure he was the kind of man she dreamed of marrying one day. She didn’t understand he valued his freedom more than his physical pleasure.

Josiah and I had a warm relationship, which I choose to call friendship. He was my black electron and I his white in the momentum of ideas in the uncertainty of time. We were canonically conjugated variables with the momentum of one with the energy and time of the other. Murder most certain eclipsed the second pair of variables.

Heisenberg perceived something beyond physics when he said, “The more precisely the position is determined the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant and vice versa.” Surely this applies equally to life.

It seems to me I amplify my uncertainty to imprecision by my dalliances and contrariness. Is Nina a product of lust, love or revenge? Is she the personification of my angst, anger or mania for control? Heisenberg is implying there is no such thing as control. Neither people nor electrons can be punished with knowledge or authority to behave as desired. Therefore, to be a control freak is to be totally out of control. Uncertainty theory is merely pointing out the obvious. Could that be it? Could it be that I’ve been dropped into this universe and want to punish it for doing so? Was the choice I had from the beginning no choice at all?

Josiah was caught in this web and now he is in my dreams. Does that mean that even death is uncertain, that the ultimate momentum to justice will one day be precise when everything balances out? If order comes out of chaos, why am I so obsessed with control?

In the uncertainty of my nightmares, I’ve thought I could be deported, then too I’ve thought I could be murdered by my wife. There is no doubt she would do it if she had the certainty of getting away with it. I have become a pervasive irritant to those most proximate to me: my wife, my church, my company, the South African government, and yes, you too, dear Nina. Collectively, you have no appetite for my uncertainty.

Sarah is incredibly unhappy. Am I responsible? The church, my company and the Afrikaner government are paranoid. Have I contributed to this? Am I a toxic variable in a world that denies the unavoidable uncertainty of toxicity? It is only a matter of time before that toxicity pollutes my work and infects Nina if it hasn’t already. What to do? That is the question.

Heisenberg was on to something. Luckily, he fell short with his atomic bomb, or Germany might have won the Second World War with that uncertainty projected with the possibility that there would be no Seamus Devlin in South Africa today. Chance finds him here. How poetically uncertain!

As I stumble forward, thinking of Heisenberg and the horrific possibility of Germany launching an atomic holocaust, I marvel at how that uncertainly has contributed to the completion of my tasks. Could that be what God is, the verification of the Uncertainty Principle?

HISTORY & MYTHOLOGY OF A TIME

I share this with you having read Michael Frayn and David Burke’s “The Copenhagen Papers,” (2000) allegedly based on a curious package of papers buried under the floorboards of a home in Denmark relating to the meeting of Heisenberg with his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr.

As bizarre and controversial as was this play, Werner Heisenberg did meet his mentor Niels Bohr three times during his visit to Copenhagen, September 15 – 21, 1941. Germany was winning the war, but Hitler was suspect of the Copenhagen Institute, and according to “Niels Bohr Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity” (1991), Hitler planned to blow up the institute by mining its sewers, but the plot was uncovered (p 490).  

After the meetings by these two scientists, their accounts proved conflicting and self-serving. Bohr, at the time, apparently was working with the British unknown to Heisenberg, while his account of his meeting with Heisenberg surprised him on how little specificity existed in Germany's approach to the making of an atomic bomb.

John Cornwell in “Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact” (2003), writes that Albert Speers, who was at the time Director of Munitions with slave labor offered Heisenberg all and whatever resources he required only to be met with approach avoidance passive behavior. Cornwell writes:

Given that there were many imponderables, including the correct critical mass (to the atomic bomb), it was a strange performance for it seemed designed to provoke interest and high expectations. When virtually unlimited resources were offered by Albert Speer in June that year (1941), Heisenberg spurned the offer. It was possible that he was merely attempting to curry favour in order to remain an important figure in atomic physics, but that surely had its dangers since the German armies were not at this point prospering in Russia, and America had entered the war with its prodigious industrial might.

Yet, while Heisenberg sought, and was given, increasing responsibility for the atomic physics programme, he was taking on a variety of extraneous duties and activities. He was hardly focused on a task that should have absorbed all his energies (pp. 311-312).

Elsewhere:

The contrast between America’s bomb effort with its vast factories and processing sites, its cities in the desert and its many tens of thousands of personnel (Re. Manhattan Project in Los Alamo, New Mexico), could not have been more extraordinary and indicative of the feebleness of Germany’s research project (Ibid, p 329).

Albert Speer confirms this offer to Heisenberg in “Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs of Albert Speer” (1970), while Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin reveal the absolute commitment of The Manhattan Project in “American Prometheus: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (2005), as Oppenheimer was clearly "the father of the bomb," something he later regretted.   

MANHATTAN PROJECT

History is often confusing as well as self-serving. 

The American effort to create the atomic bomb started with a letter.  The letter was addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but it was not written by Albert Einstein as many believed, but by Leo Szilard and signed by Einstein and delivered to FDR on August 2, 1939.

A month later, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 to initiate World War Two. FDR who was a decisive if also an impulsive leader, immediately created The Manhattan Project placing J. Robert Oppenheimer, an atomic physicist, in charge of the project. 

FDR would die in office on April 12, 1945 with his Vice President Harry S. Truman becoming president, having no knowledge of The Manhattan Project beforehand which developed the first atomic bomb. 

Truman, an equally precipitous man of action, three months after becoming president, authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945, ending the war in the Far East, as the War in Europe had already come to a close in June 1945.

Americans have a cliché, “He who hesitates is lost.” The German Military Command had nearly 400,000 French and British troops trapped at Dunkirk (west coast of France), but hesitated to attack with 198,000 British troops and 140,000 French troops escaping to Great Britain while 40,000 troops were captured. 

As Cornwell’s “German Scientists” points out, Hitler was fascinated with quick strikes and immediate results such as the V-2 rockets, and showed a lack of sophisticated strategic thinking.  Some have charged this was due to his ambivalence towards what he thought was “Jewish science,” or quanta physics.

In the end, it would seem, we never escape our inherent nature.

Thank you for stimulating my interest in a bit of recall,

Jim