When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

Mochizuki has created a complete universe, of which, for the moment, he is the sole inhabitant.

“A perspective is by nature limited. It offers us one single vision of a landscape. 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.”

today I say to you with absolute certainty that all things can exist in two ways, and that nothing is as solid as it appears; the stone in the child’s hand, which he aims at the idle sparrow on its branch, could run like water between his fingers.”

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. Those hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: 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.

if we cannot know, at the same time, such basic things as where an electron is and how it moves, we also cannot predict the exact path it will follow between two points, only its multiple possible paths. That was the ingenious thing about Schrödinger’s equation: somehow it managed to thread together the infinite destinies of a particle, all its states, all its trajectories, in a single schema—the wave function—showing them all superimposed. A particle could cross space in many ways, but from among them it chose only one. How? Through pure chance. For Heisenberg, it was no longer possible to speak of any subatomic phenomenon with absolute certainty. 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.

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.

Science can no longer confront reality in the same way. The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations: these arise from the fact that its interventions alter the objects it proposes to investigate. The light science shines on the world not only changes our vision of reality, but even the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks.” Scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.