How on earth did you ever get from "they-yah to he-ah?" (I.e., "from there to here" in New England parlance.)
It is my understanding (such as it is) that the uncertainty principle itself confirms that there is an inherent disconnect of some important magnitude between the "certainty" of observation (i.e., a discrete measurement) and the "certainty" that the observation really maps to "objective" reality in its fullest sense.
It ought to be obvious that, just because we have quantifiable "experience" of a phenomenon once under some arbitrarily selected criterion, this does not (cannot) make it a universal law of Nature. Yet once we make the discrete experience a "rule," all subsequent experience of a like kind runs the risk of being filtered through that very rule forever more, without due regard for its applicablility to the case at hand. (E.g., a rule that helps us locate the space/time coordinates of a particle will not help us understand its wave behavior.)
At the end of the day, such a maneuver tells you more about man than it does about the reality external to man.
Fortunately, the heart of the uncertainty principle is reconciled by the principle of complementarity. The most basic example of complementarity is particle/wave duality. As Heisenberg showed, one cannot know both the position (space/time coordinates) and the velocity (wave function) of a particle simultaneously. The observer must choose which aspect of what is ultimately a single integrated phenomenon he wants to investigate. This casts the problem into the frame of choosing which of two seemingly mutually-exclusive properties of the given object is most relevant to the type of knowledge one seeks in a given observer-defined experimental situation. But the complementarity principle tells us that, at the end of the day, the two aspects are not only not mutually exclusive, but both are necessary to the complete description of the system of which they are "modes."
In short, the insights of quantum theory tend to show that Aristotle's Law of the Excluded Middle — although it may operate perfectly well as far as we can tell in the Newtonian Paradigm — seemingly falls to pieces at the quantum level.
This is a huge challenge to our "ordinary" ways of thinking about the world, which for many centuries by now has been heavily invested in "true/false," "yes/no," "0/1" (binary) "styles" of thinking....
“{If our own existence and nature invalidate the certainty of any observation, all the observations on which the uncertainty principle are based have to be thrown out—thus, no uncertainty principle.
How on earth did you ever get from “they-yah to he-ah?” (I.e., “from there to here” in New England parlance.) “
If you try really hard, I think you can understand this. (By the way, I was born in Ipswich, Mass, and have lived in NE most of my life, so the explanation of the coloquialism was unnecessary for me.)
It’s called reason.
Premise: It is not possible to derive certain knowledge about anything by observation and reasoning from that observation.
Hypothesis: It is impossible to know anything with certainty because the physical (observable) world is governed by laws that make it impossible to know anything with certainty.
Argument: Since “it is not possible to derive certain knowledge about anything by reason, it is not possible to know anything with certainty. The claim that the uncertainty principle is known, must be false, since no certain knowledge is possible.
Here is the primary problem with using the so-called uncertainty principle as the basis of logical argument—it makes every argument self-contradictory and therefore invalid.
In the end, the “’ordinary’ ways of thinking about the world, which for many centuries by now has been heavily invested in “true/false,” “yes/no,” “0/1” (binary) “styles” of thinking,” is absolutely correct. A thing is either true or it isn’t, a thing is either alive or it is dead, you are either correct or mistaken, reality is what it is, no matter what post-modernist irrationality you want to thrust against it. Either you can jump off 30 story buildings on to the pavement below and live or you cannot. Care to make the test?
Hank
No, the reality is that the wavepacket has the uncertainty built in so to speak. That is why an electron doesn't immediately collapse into the nucleus. Both its position and momentum would then be known.
But the complementarity principle tells us that, at the end of the day, the two aspects are not only not mutually exclusive, but both are necessary to the complete description of the system of which they are "modes."
The complementarity principle doesn't apply. Think superposition principle.