Sautoy, M. du: What we cannot know (2016)
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- Date
- 22. 6.2016 16:08:54
- Footnote
- Even if the future cannot be predicted, people can still hope to uncover the laws of physics. As Stephen Hawking wrote in his 1988 bestseller "A Brief History of Time", "I still believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature." But how can people know when they have got there? They have been wrong before: Lord Kelvin, a great physicist, confidently announced in 1900: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now." Just a few years later, physics was upended by the new theories of relativity and quantum physics. Quantum physics presents particular limits on human knowledge, as it suggests that there is a basic randomness or uncertainty in the universe. For example, electrons exist as a "wave function", smeared out across space, and do not have a definite position until you observe them (which "collapses" the wave function). At the same time there seems to be an absolute limit on how much people can know. This is quantified by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says that there is a trade-off between knowing the position and momentum of a particle. So the more you know about where an electron is, the less you know about which way it is going. Even scientists find this weird. As Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said: "If quantum physics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
