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The pinnacle of his investigations was the concept of motive: a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object. “The heart of the heart” he called this
Only when complementary views of the same reality combine are we capable of achieving fuller access to the knowledge of things.
The more complex the object we are attempting to apprehend, the more important it is to have different sets of eyes, so that these rays of light converge and we can see the One through the many. That is the nature of true vision: it brings together already known points of view and shows others hitherto unknown, allowing us to understand that all are, in actuality, part of the same thing.”
quantum objects had no fixed identity, but instead dwelt in a space of possibilities.
An electron, Heisenberg explained, did not exist in a single place, but in many, and had not one velocity, but several. The wave function showed all those possibilities superimposed.
His original intuition had been correct: it was impossible to “see” a quantum entity for the simple reason that it did not have a single identity.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised.
what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.
Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.
Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears.
Before being measured, it has no attributes; prior to observation, it cannot even be conceived of. It exists in a specific manner when it is detected by a specific instrument. Between one measurement and the next, there is no point in asking how it moves, what it is, or where it is located. Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.
The transition from the “possible” to the “real” only occurred during the act of observation or measurement. There was, therefore, no independently existing quantum reality.
Measured as a wave, an electron appeared as such; measured as a particle, it adopted this other form.
“When we speak of the science of our era,” Heisenberg explained, “we are talking about our relationship with nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a game between man and the world.
Schrödinger’s cat, like any elementary particle, was alive and dead
