Looking at the mirror

            …[A]t the end of the last century, the atoms of chemistry could no longer be considered as the ultimate indivisible building-stones of matter. These were now thought to consist of three kinds of basic units — the protons, neutrons and electrons of today. The practical consequences of this new knowledge have been the transmutation of elements and the rise of atomic physics, and they have thus become extremely important. Basically, however, nothing has been changed in principle by our acceptance of protons, neutrons and electrons as the smallest building-stones of matter, if we interpret these as the real essence. What is important for the materialistic world-view is simply the possibility that such small building-stones of elementary particles exist and that they may be considered the ultimate objective reality. Thus, the well-constructed world-view of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preserved, and thanks to its simplicity it managed to retain its full power of conviction for a number of decades.

            But in our century it is just in this sphere that fundamental changes have taken place in the basis of atomic physics which have made us abandon the world-view of ancient atomic philosophy. It has become clear that the desired objective reality of the elementary particles is too crude an over-simplification of what really happens, and that it must give way to very much more abstract conceptions. For if we wish to form a picture of the nature of these elementary particles, we can no longer ignore the physical processes through which we obtain our knowledge of them. While, in observing everyday objects, the physical process involved in making the observation plays a subsidiary role only, in the case of the smallest building particles of matter, every process of observation produces a large disturbance. We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor is it any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively, since the only processes we can refer to as taking place are those which represent the interplay of particles with some other physical system, e.g., a measuring instrument.

            Thus, the objective reality of the elementary particles has been strangely dispersed, not into the fog of some new ill-defined or still unexplained conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behaviour of the elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behaviour. The atomic physicist has had to resign himself t o the fact that his science is but a link in the infinite chain of man’s argument with nature, and that it cannot simply speak of nature ‘in itself”. Science always presupposes the existence of man and, as Bohr has said, we must become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life….

            In all this, technology intervenes radically in the relationship of nature to man, radically changing his environment and thus bringing him face to face with the scientific aspect of the world. The claim of science, that it can reach into the whole universe by means of a method which, at a chosen moment, will isolate and illuminate details and thus advance from one relation to the next, is mirrored in technology, which progresses step by step to ever-new realms, changes our surroundings before our very eyes and thus stamps them with our image. Just as science subordinates every detailed question to the great task of understanding nature as a whole, so even the smallest technical advance serves the general aim of extending man’s material powers. The value of this aim is questioned just as little as scientists question the value of an understanding of nature. Both aims become fused into the common-place slogan, ‘knowledge is power’.

            While this subordination to a single purpose can probably be proved to exist in every single technical process, the connection is often so indirect that it can hardly be considered a part of a conscious plan to reach an aim. Here technology no longer appears as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological process in which man’s organic functions are increasingly transferred to his environment. In other words, we have here a biological process which, as such, is removed from man’s control; for while man can do what he wishes, he cannot will what he wishes.

Werner Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, trans. A.J. Pomerans (London, 1958), pp. 13-16; 19-20.

For a related post, see here.