Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science - My Sehir

SCHRÖDINGER’S GRAVE 131technology. Even Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” one ofthe cornerstones of quantum mechanics, emerges naturallyfrom Schrödinger’s “wave equation.”HEISENBERG WAS CERTAINIn an earlier book, Voodoo Science, I used the example of clockingthe speed of an automobile to illustrate the classic dilemmaof measurement. You could set up two pylons on the side ofthe road a known distance apart. An observer at pylon onepresses a button that starts a clock running when the car passes;a second observer presses a button that stops the clock whenthe car passes pylon two. Divide the distance between the pylonsby the time on the clock, and you now have a measure ofthe car’s speed.Each time you make the measurement, however, you will geta slightly different result. As in all measurements, there aresources of “noise” having to do with the accuracy with whichdistance or time is measured—the reaction time of the observers,for example. The noise could be reduced by replacing the observerswith automatic photocells, measuring the distance betweenthe pylons with an interferometer, and replacing the clockwith an atomic clock. Most simply, you could reduce the relativecontribution of noise by simply moving the pylons fartherapart.The farther you move the pylons apart to improve the relativeaccuracy, however, the less certain you can be about where thecar is when it is traveling between the pylons. If asked, youranswer would have to be “between the pylons.”This trade-off is the classic dilemma of measurement. It hadalways been assumed that with better design and sufficient resources,you would be able to reduce the uncertainties as far asyou wish. It was time for one of the greatest scientific insightsin history. It came from a young German physicist still in histwenties.