I have thought for many years that the point of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was that you could not measure a system without disturbing it. Hence the idea that your measurement of one aspect (say, momentum) must disturb another, like position, since all measurement involves interaction.<\/p>\n\n
I was wrong. It turns out, at least according to John Barrow, that this is a vulgar misunderstanding of the Heisenberg principle, perpetrated as a way around the mathematical difficulties. What it in fact states is that the concepts<\/em> of position and momentum stop making clear sense at a sufficiently small scale. So my clever idea that God might be the sort of entity (or fact about the universe) that could know without observing turns out to be as otiose as any other idea about God.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have thought for many years that the point of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was that you could not measure a system without disturbing it. Hence the idea that your measurement of one aspect (say, momentum) must disturb another, like position, … Continue reading