“{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
But only if you're a slave to Aristotle's Law of the Excluded Middle. :^)
What the complementarity principle does is to put two seemingly contradictory entities into a relation such that, taken together, a complete description of the system that they together mutually constitute can be given. Crudely put, "either/or" situations do not exist for entities in complementary relation; complementarity is a condition that exists when "both" are true, but neither in itself is "complete."
No it doesn't Hank. It just makes arguments indeterminate, incomplete. This doesn't necessarily make arguments invalid — unless determinism is the result you wanted corroborated from the get-go, and you won't take "no!" for an answer. But that's "a horse of a different color."
In which case one could understand the dim view of folks who believe that knowledge isn't knowledge unless it's "certain" knowledge; who tend to hold a hostile opinion towards people who don't agree with them, especially those who have the temerity to produce non-conforming evidence....
No it doesn't Hank. It just makes arguments indeterminate, incomplete. This doesn't necessarily make arguments invalid — unless determinism is the result you wanted corroborated from the get-go, and you won't take "no!" for an answer. But that's "a horse of a different color."
In which case one could understand the dim view of folks who believe that knowledge isn't knowledge unless it's "certain" knowledge; who tend to hold a hostile opinion towards people who don't agree with them, especially those who have the temerity to produce non-conforming evidence....