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Werner Heisenberg - Harper & Row (1958) ·

Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution of Modern Science and the Indeterminacy Principle

Werner Heisenberg - Harper & Row (1958)

Of Werner Heisenberg - Harper & Row (1958)

A foundational exposition by one of the fathers and supreme architects of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, on the overwhelming philosophical implications of the Uncertainty Principle and the physics of elementary particles. In this masterpiece, Heisenberg argues with the irrefutable weight of quantum equations that the most sacred concepts of classical physics (such as strict and inflexible determinism, pure objectivity absolutely independent of the observer, and the atomistic-mechanistic model of the universe in its entirety) have been invalidated and pulverized at the subatomic level. Paradoxically, the author himself suggests, categorically, that the vanguard of contemporary theoretical physics forces us, almost reluctantly, to return to ontological concepts originally formulated by Aristotle in classical antiquity. Specifically, he points out that the only rational way to understand the superposition of quantum states and probability as objective physical realities is through the rescue and application of the ancient hylemorphic distinction between 'power' (Aristotelian potentia objective) and 'act'.
Consult original study at Werner Heisenberg - Harper & Row (1958)

Editorial rereading

When Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner and undisputed colossus of quantum physics, gave these lectures, he was signing the death certificate of the materialist worldview that had intoxicated the West since the so-called Enlightenment. The intellectual arrogance of Laplacian mechanism—the superb belief that if a demon or supercomputer knew the position and velocity of every particle in the cosmos, it could predict the exact future like an inexorable gear clock—died without honor the day Heisenberg formulated his famous Uncertainty Principle. But what is truly monumental in this work, the secret that secular academia desperately tries to conceal, is not only the fall of determinism, but the unconditional and empirically forced surrender of atomic physics before the supreme court of Scholastic Philosophy and Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphism. Heisenberg realized, to the disturbing amazement of the Copenhagen blackboards, that an electron does not "exist" at a fixed, immovable point in space as if it were a solid, impenetrable marble (the simplistic view of Democritus's atomism that materialist Marxism inherited). Rather, before measurement, the electron exists in a mysterious "superposition," a statistical matrix of probabilities, a "tendency to be." The brilliant German physicist recognized and publicly confessed that this cloud of mathematical probability is nothing other than the very concept of Power (the "potentia") that Aristotle postulated with overwhelming clairvoyance more than two thousand two hundred years ago. Only when the act of observation occurs, that amorphous power collapses and is actualized in space-time as an Act. This observation completely destroys empiricist reductionism. The purported "solid matter" of modernity dissolves into the depths of reality to reveal pure mathematics, immaterial potentialities and objective information. The consequences of this philosophical triumph are deadly for the social engineering of progressivism. If reality at its most intimate and fundamental level is not an assembly of "material bricks" colliding at random, but a realm of immaterial actualizable powers mediated by observation, then spirit (the ordering Logos, the intellect, the measuring consciousness) precedes and ontologically grounds matter. Immanentist dogma, which degrades man to a biological machine, assumes a 19th century physics that true science proved false in the 1920s. This founding treaty constitutes our heavy artillery in the culture war. Every time secular totalitarianism invokes "Science" to justify institutional atheism or the deconstruction of natural morality, it does so based on a zombie paradigm, already refuted. Quantum physics itself, by calling for Aristotelian categories and demanding a teleological and transcendent order to be minimally intelligible, confirms that Christian Faith and high Reason were never in conflict. Whoever denies the transcendent plane after reading Heisenberg does not suffer from scientific ignorance, but from ideological obstinacy. Legal Note: This critical analysis is carried out under the protection of Art. 28 (news of general interest) and Art. 10 (right of citation) of Law 11,723 on Intellectual Property of the Argentine Republic. The original work and its title belong to its respective author and publication medium, cited on this page.