The Uncertainty Principle

I have always been intrigued by science. Not the white lab coat kind. Not the kind where the scientist meticulously measures the outcomes of an experiment against last week’s results. What grabs me are the grandiose, overarching visions like Relativity or, best of all, The Uncertainty Principle. Who could resist something called The Uncertainty Principle? Introduced by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the year Babe Ruth emphatically hit 60 homers out of the park, it states that the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less possible it is to predict its momentum and vice versa. Matter has both particle properties and wave properties. If you identify the particle properties of a unit of matter and know its location, you can’t be absolutely sure of its wave properties because wave properties are all about movement, about probability. They are not about certainty. Before 1927, only human ingenuity seemed to restrict how precisely we could measure things. Then Heisenberg introduced a fundamental limit on the precision of some simultaneous measurements. Again, the better you pin down a particle’s position, the less certain you can be about its momentum. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle put an end to the dream of a perfectly knowable universe. It reduced the smug belief in certainty to the much less inflated notion of probability. It looked into small, discrete particles and waves in motion as two different aspects of the same reality. Scientific uncertainty makes space for the spiritual idea of unknowability and the radical perception that nothing stays the same. Things change. This is both wonderful and terrible.

It used to be, in the Newtonian universe of my childhood, that I would visit a friend on West End Avenue after school and come back to the apartment where I lived with my parents at the corner of Broadway and 83rd street. At exactly six o’clock, my father would walk in the front door, the New York Post rolled up under his arm. He would join us in the dining room and the three of us would commence to eat our lamb chops. The probability of that scenario seemed to be 100%. This predictability continued throughout my early years until one day in 1956 we all went to see Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner in Anastasia at one of the big movie houses downtown. It was a special occasion. I sat safely between their soft bodies, entranced by my mother’s crepe de chine and the period costumes in the movie. Then, my father said he needed some air. He got up and collapsed on the red carpet opposite the popcorn. He survived, but life began to change in various ways.

All that predictability had its merits when I was a child. It fostered the illusion of security like a chewed up blanket or a teddy bear with one ear. But over time, I began to associate the magic act of knowing with imprisonment, a narrow, airless space devoid of spirit, devoid of art. Uncertainty is hard. Very hard. Those waves can knock you down and drag you under. Sometimes, they grow into tsunamis. But in the end knowing is overrated. In fact, it tends to become toxic. If you’re fixated on materiality, on the structure of the particle, you miss all the exuberance of the wave. Fire, water, air, light, shadow, poetry. Waves are disturbances that travel through space in a transfer of energy. They’re more like dreams than sandwiches. Many people are uncomfortable with indeterminacy. I want my sandwich and I want it now on rye toast.

The yearning for certainty can lead to all kinds of dangerous orthodoxies, particularly in religion and politics. We were brought up on the myth of a lost Eden, a space/time before the Fall when everything was perfect. We don’t remember Eden, of course, but the afterglow of the fantasy lingers. It’s the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. In this paradise, there is no sickness, no violence, no death. But also no James Baldwin, no Janis Joplin, no life. Still, that fantasy has a stranglehold on the revisionist imagination and some people will kill to bring it back. This is because the fixation is fundamentally authoritarian. It arises out of a consciousness that can’t tolerate uncertainty; that wants someone to enforce the old order, that can’t make space for the new, the inclusive. It imagines a culture where all the pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and everyone knows which piece goes where. Everyone knows her place. If we were better able to live with uncertainty, we might get lost, but then again we’re already lost. And when we find ourselves, we may discover despite the sand in our hair and the salt in our eyes, that there are new waves washing over us and clearing the field of our vision.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.