The moment of uncertainty
Heisenberg thought the attempt to construct a visualizable solution for quantum mechanics might lead to trouble, and so he advised paying attention only to the mathematics. Michael Frayn captures this side of Heisenberg well in his play Copenhagen. When the Bohr character charges that Heisenberg doesn’t pay attention to the sense of what he’s doing so long as the mathematics works out, the Heisenberg character indignantly responds, “Mathematics is sense. That’s what sense is”.
.. Was Heisenberg disturbed by the implications of what he was doing?
No. Both he and Bohr were excited about what they had discovered. From the very beginning they realized that it had profound philosophical implications, and were thrilled to be able to explore them. Almost immediately both began thinking and writing about the epistemological implications of the uncertainty principle.
Was anyone besides Heisenberg and Bohr troubled?
The reaction was mixed. Arthur Eddington, an astronomer and science communicator, was thrilled, saying that the epistemological implications of the uncertainty principle heralded a new unification of science, religion, and the arts. The Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman was deeply disturbed, writing that “the bottom has dropped clean out” of the world. He was terrified about its impact on the public. Once the implications sink in, he wrote, it would “let loose a veritable intellectual spree of licentious and debauched thinking.”
.. How did the public react?
Immediately and enthusiastically. A few days after October 29, 1929, the New York Times, tongue-in-cheek, invoked the uncertainty principle as the explanation for the stock market crash.
.. Outside of physics, has our knowledge that uncertainty is a feature of the subatomic world, and the uses that it has been put by writers and philosophers, helped to change our worldview in any way?
I think so. The contemporary world does not always feel smooth, continuous, and law-governed, like the Newtonian World. Our world instead often feels jittery, discontinuous, and irrational. That has sometimes prompted writers to appeal to quantum imagery and language to describe it.