When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

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.