Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

Discovered in 1927 by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the uncertainty principle demonstrated that there are features of the world—like the position and the speed of a particle—that a classical physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness that makes them uncertain. It’s as if the classical tradition viewed the world through pristine, polished spectacles that brought all physical features into perfectly sharp focus, while the spectacles donned by the quantum perspective are inherently foggy. In the large, everyday world of common experience, the quantum fog is too thin to impact our vision, so the classical and quantum perspectives are barely distinguishable. But the smaller you probe, the foggier the quantum lenses become and the fuzzier the view. The metaphor might suggest that all we need do is clean the quantum lenses. But the uncertainty principle established that no matter how fastidious we are and regardless of the advanced equipment we use, there will always be a minimal amount of fogginess that cannot be wiped away. In fact, my phrasing betrays the bias of human experience. It is only by comparison with the demonstrably incorrect classical view—the view we humans discovered first because it’s both simpler and extraordinarily accurate on the scales accessible to human senses—that quantum reality seems hazy. It is actually the classical...