Week 2 Reflections on Uncertainty

Reflections on Uncertainty

The electron has to be somewhere, when we can’t identify its location. It can’t be nowhere, can it? It must have a form when we aren’t looking, it can’t be nothing, can it? I don’t think concepts like these are easily filed in our minds…yet. Even if we want to believe some of these ideas, I don’t think they can truly be embraced by the deepest recesses of our minds…yet.

It is interesting to note that Physics is a science, and etymologists think the root of the word science probably means “to separate one thing from another”, “to divide by cutting”. This very much reflects our methods of attaining knowledge; dividing, dividing and dividing everything into its pieces and parts until (we think) we can say we “know” (understand) it. (I even did it here by breaking the word down!) Yet the uncertainty principle is simply saying WE can’t predict the behavior of the electron. And I think the modern western mind says, if WE can’t identify it, it can’t be identified.

Perhaps the impulse to divide in order to understand is a reflection of our very existence; the zygote, once formed, must continue to divide and divide in order for life to be. And the cells of our bodies must continue to divide through out our entire life. How? What instigates this division? Bio-chemically, we can describe it, but we don’t really understand the impetus behind it. It is a mysterious Will. Maybe, the electron has a Will of some kind; the power of intention beyond anything we’ve imagined, that causes its apparently unpredictable and seemingly ‘absurd’ behavior.

And maybe there is an entire world of possibilities and happenings that we have not yet evolved to be aware of. For instance, in some frogs, their brains have evolved to respond (visually) only to small moving objects. A frog can literally starve to death surrounded by perfectly good, but motionless, flies. It simply can not ‘see’ or rather, seems to be ‘programmed’ solely to respond to moving flies. Of course, this is a genius of evolution. Better to eat fresh living flies then pebbles you (oops!) thought was a fly. Maybe, as we quest for the answers to these Quantum questions, our minds are evolving as well, and realities that have been before us all along will become apparent.