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71-77
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1-7
8-14
15-21
22-28
29-35
36-42
43-49
50-56
57-63
64-70
71-77
78-84
85-91
92-98
99-105
106-112
113-119
120-122
We had hoped that the human errors would disappear, and that we would
ourselves have God’s view. But it turns out that the errors cannot be taken
out of the observations. And that is true of stars, or atoms, or just looking at
somebody’s picture, or hearing the report of somebody’s speech.
knowledge came to fruition in the sleepy university town of Göttingen,
Germany. In 1920, the link between Göttingen and the outside world was the
railway. That was the way the visitors came from Berlin and abroad, eager to
exchange the new ideas that were racing ahead in physics. It was a byword in
Göttingen that science came to life on the train to Berlin. Because that is
where people argued and contradicted and had new ideas. And had them
challenged too.
elsewhere by Relativity. But in 1921 there was appointed to the chair of
physics Max Born who began a series of seminars that brought everyone
interested in atomic physics here. It is rather surprising to reflect that Max
Born was almost forty when he was appointed. By enlarge, physicists have
done their best work before they are thirty (mathematicians even early,
biologists perhaps a little later). But Born had a remarkable personal, Socratic
gift. He drew young men to him, he got the best out of them, and the ideas that
he and they exchanged and challenged also produced his best work. Out of
that wealth of names, who am I to choose? Obviously Werner Heisenberg, who
did his finest work here with Born. Then, when Erwin Schrodinger published
a different form of basic atomic physics, here is where the arguments took
place. And from all over the world people came to Göttingen to join in.
done by midnight oil. Did physics in the 1920’s really consist of argument,
seminar, discussion, dispute? Yes it did. Yes it still does. The people who met
here, the people who meet in laboratories still, only end their work with a
mathematical formulation. They begin it by trying to solve conceptual riddles.
The riddles of the subatomic particles—of the electrons and the rest—are
mental riddles.”
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among professors was (because of the way university time-tables are laid out)
that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the electron would behave like a
particle; on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays it would behave like a wave.
How could you match those two aspects brought from the large scale world
and pushed into a single entity, into this “Lilliput” Gulliver’s Travelsworld
of the inside of the atom? That is what the speculation and argument was
about. And that requires, not calculation, but insight, imagination—if you
like, metaphysics. I remember a phrase that Max Born used when he came to
England many years after, and that still stands in his autobiography. He said:
“I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.”
reality. The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot
be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it
interacts with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us.
There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an active
judgement. Is the electron a particle? It behaves like one in the Bohr atom. But
de Broglie in 1924 made a beautiful wave model in which the orbits are the
places where an exact, whole number of waves, close round the nucleus. Max
Born thought of a train of electrons as if each were riding on a crankshaft, so
that collectively they constitute a series of Gaussian Curves, a wave of
probability. A new conception was being made, on the train to Berlin and the
professorial walks in the woods of Göttingen: that whatever fundamental
units the world is put together from, they are more delicate, more fugitive,
more startling than we catch in the butterfly net of out senses.
1927. Earlier that year Werner Heisenberg gave a new characterization of the
electron. Yes, it is a particle, he said, but a particle which yields only limited
information, that is, you can specify where it is at this instant, but then you
cannot impose on it a specific speed and direction at the setting-off. Or
conversely, if you insist that you are going to fire it at a certain speed and
certain direction, then you cannot specify exactly what its starting-point is—
or, of course, its end-point.
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in its totality. That is, for instance, its speed and its position fit together in
such a way that they are confined by the tolerance of the quantum.
Twentieth Century, but in the history of science.
In one sense, it is a
robust principle of the everyday. We know that we cannot ask the world to be
exact. If an object (a familiar face, for example) had to be exactlythe same
before we recognized it, we would never recognize it from one day to the next.
We recognize the object to be the same because it is much the same; it is never
exactly like it was, it is tolerably alike. In the act of recognition, a judgement is
built in – an area of tolerance or uncertainty.
described with certainty, that is, with zero tolerance. What makes the
principle profound is that Heisenberg specifies the tolerance that can be
reached. the measuring rod is Max Planck’s quantum. In the world of the
atom, the area of uncertainty is always mapped out by the quantum.
is a bad name. In science or outside it,
things are notuncertain; our knowledge is merely confined within a certain
tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that
name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense. Science has progressed
step-by-step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it
has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature,
and man and a man, can only take place within a certain tolerance. But
second, I also use the word passionately about the real world. All knowledge,
all knowledge between human beings can only be exchanged within a play of
tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature,
or in religion, or in politics, or even in any form of thought that aspires to
dogma. It is a major tragedy of my lifetime and ours that, here in Göttingen,
scientists were refining to the most exquisite precision the Principle of
Tolerance, and turning their backs on the fact that all around them
tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.
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fixed once for all the realization that ALLknowledge is limited.”
or Bronowski’s Principle of
Toleranceis what Korzybski called the Principle of Non-Allness.
Interestingly, Eddington called it the Principle of Indeterminacyby which
he meant reality is not uncertain, rather the observation is indeterminate.23
Bronowski continues:
there should arise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a
counter-conception; a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks
back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as
I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the
despots’ belief that they have absolute certainty.”24
—Jacob Bronowski
certainty. Certainty is ignorance of ignorance, and there is no greater arrogance
than that produced by a belief in certainty. If we humans become aware or our
ignorance, then we have knowledge of ignorance—with knowledge of ignorance, we
can learn from our mistakes and protect ourselves in the future.
does not mean that we can’t know reality. This is not
what Korzybski and Bronowski are telling us. They are saying that our knowledge is
incomplete, we can know a great deal about reality, but Nature is constructed in such
a way that she will not reveal ALLher secrets. We humans can never know ALL
there is to know about anything.
Allnessas Korzybski called it, he invented a device called the “Structural
Differential”25.
Author’s*(annotation)
24Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1976, ibid
25Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933-48, ibid
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our scientific ‘real’ apple as a parabola.
apple. The parabola can represent any ‘real’ object or event in Universe. The parabola
would extend indefinitely into space. Korzybski closed the top of the parabola with a
broken line—as if the parabola was broken off— to remind us that this is an
indeterminate reality. But when you and I observe the apple, we do not see the
indefinite reality, we see a sharp, crisp, juicy apple, a definiteapple, a finite illusion.
Korzybski represented this ‘object’ as a finite circle.
The information that our human brain can perceive and discern from its senses. That
which the observer can determine. because, what we can know is always less than
what there is to know—the characteristics of our ‘object’ are less than the
characteristics of the ‘reality’.
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with some of the characteristics of the ‘object’ apple. He also showed that some
characteristics did not connect.
apple we know through our senses does not and cannot contain ALLthe information
of the ‘real’ apple.
all decisions without ALLthe information. This discovery leads to a major revelation
if we can but see the higher truth in it. We humans live in a world where all our
decisions, all our choices are made without ALLthe information. We humans can
know but we cannot know all. We humans make mistakes, not because we are bad, not
because we are stupid, not because we are incompetent, not because we are lazy, nor
even because we are careless. We humans make mistakes because we are ignorant.
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Nature. This in fact is the only cause of mistakes.
sure. We can never know ALL.
did not check under the chair to see if it had broken since its last use. When you ate
lunch at your favorite restaurant last week, you assumed the waitress had washed
her hands. You assumed the cook did not have hepatitis. If you had assumed
otherwise, you would not have walked into that restaurant. You would not have eaten
your lunch. We humans assume. Herein lies our uncertainty—that’s all we humans
can do. There is nothing wrong in our assuming, we are simply obeying a fundamental
‘law’ of Nature.
of Non-Allnessmeans that we humans make all of our decisions with incomplete and
imperfect knowing. We make every choice without all the information. All humans live
and act in state of ignorance.
those who make mistakes are bad. They are stupid or careless—lazy or incompetent—
just no damn good. If they were good, they wouldn’t make mistakes. Everyone knows
that. Decent people don’t make mistakes. This is nearly a universal belief.
world of space-binding and is not sensitive to time. We humans share the animal’s
body, and we also share their spacial intelligence. Recall my discussion of space-
binding from We Can All Win!:
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