The next time I read the Heisenberg uncertainty principle it will be the first. I have been upfront about being unschooled in the sciences. I function with limited intellectual capacity and intuitive reasoning. I reason from street level rather than Ivory Tower heights. That is the best I can do. Sometimes I hit, sometimes I miss.
Don't worry about that overmuch, dear MNR: In all likelihood LeGrande is also "unschooled" in the matter.
Evidently he invokes the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as some great magical mantra, the sheer invocation of which disposes of the very possibility of any following debate. Which has the added side benefit of precluding any question about his understanding of that self-same principle.
Heisenberg isolated multiple "uncertainty relations" that pertain to observations of the quantum world. What has come to be known as the uncertainty principle is a sort of logical summing up of these various uncertainties.
But Heisenberg did not like that term "uncertainty." He preferred the term "inexactness." His colleague Niels Bohr further weighed in with the suggestions of "unsureness," or even better, "indeterminacy."
Thus the "uncertainty principle" is more accurately described (logically) as the "indeterminacy principle." And the reason for that is "uncertainty" implies something that we could know, but don't; while "indeterminacy" implies something that we can't know, in principle.
Thus concepts based on direct experience do not apply in the quantum world. We are led to appreciate Bohr's realization that natural science is not nature itself. Rather it expresses the relation between man and nature and thus in some critical sense is dependent on man....
I imagine in LeGrande's world, if two descriptions of a natural phenomenon are mutually exclusive, then at least one of them must be wrong.
Which is to fail to grasp the principle of complementarity. Complementarity describes the situation where both of two seemingly mutually exclusive quantum behaviors — particle or wave — are necessary to completely understand the properties of the object under observation.
The problem that cannot be overcome is that one cannot see BOTH at once; so you have to choose which to see. And the really weird thing is, whether an object behaves as a particle or a wave basically depends on the apparatus you choose to view it with. AND the apparatus, the object, and the observer of same are all part of one overall quantum system; and thus as parts mutually affect one another....
That sort of insight must bear hard on "know-it-alls"....
Glad to see you're still not taking any wooden nickels, dear MNR!
Thank you so very much for writing!