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[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Exactly what had become ‘visualizable’ according to Heisenberg in 1927,
and whence the term ‘Blurriness Relation’ in lieu of Uncertainty Principle?

As backdrop for the physics concepts and associated German vocabulary to be explored in a moment, here is a story I call “Quadrille Dance & Shotgun Wedding”:

1925. Heeding the lesson of Niels Bohr’s ill‑fated orbital theory (1913‑1918), Heisenberg is wary of developing any visual model; he wants to “get rid of the waves in any form.” Accordingly, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he sets forth his matrix‑mechanics formulation of quantum theory.

1926. Inspired by Prince de Broglie’s matter‑waves (1923), Schrödinger develops something that seems relatively visual (by comparison with Heisenberg’s matrices, that is): the wave equation for an electron. Max Born then shows how Schrödinger is ‘right for the wrong reason’: done right, the wave equation, psi y, becomes unequivocally abstract: an electron is not physically ‘smeared’ as per Schrödinger’s original concept; rather, it possesses an abstract probability distribution, expressed as |y|².

1927. Heisenberg feels competitive pressure from Schrödinger, whose partial differential equations threaten to be more ‘popular’ than Heisenberg’s recondite matrices. Consequently, Heisenberg does an about face and now endeavors to find ‘physical meaning’ in his 1925 formulation — some visible semantic content, as it were, to ride atop his esoteric syntax. An epiphany at Faelled Park results in his article entitled Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik. In his popularity race against Schrödinger, he has edged forward by a nose.

But the race itself is far from over. Just as Born argued, in 1926, that Schrödinger was ‘right but for the wrong reason,’ Bohr now argues, in 1927, that Heisenberg is right for the wrong reason. Specifically, Bohr shows Heisenberg how his (Bohr’s) would‑be argument for refuting (!) Heisenberg’s hard‑won indeterminacy relation can be neatly defeated by none other than the Schrödinger wave equation. In short, quantum theory is dead without the contributions of both Heisenberg and Schrödinger. At the prospect of such a denouement to his rivalry with Schrödinger, Heisenberg sheds tears of frustration. But Bohr’s point is underscored by Wolfgang Pauli who arrives in Copenhagen in June, whereupon he (Pauli) performs a forced reconciliation of Heisenberg to Bohr. Along the same lines, one could say that Bohr, with his ‘complementarity principle,’ performs a shotgun wedding of Heisenberg to Schrödinger in absentia. In any event, the end of the revolution is marked by the fifth Solvay conference, in October of this same memorable year, 1927.
No references? Above is an abridged version of “Quadrille Dance & Shotgun Wedding” (2016, unpublished). While abridging it, I also removed dozens of references, to minimize clutter in this first part of the post.

 

In standard Anglophone parlance, our topic will be: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (hereafter HUP). But for considerations that will be clarified as we go along, I will often follow Sommerfeld in referring to Heisenberg’s result as the Blurriness Relation (Unschärfe‑Relation) instead. Halfway into the work on this LL guest‑post, it dawned on me that the discussion could be framed as the start of a centennial celebration: As of 2025, we now start a three‑year retrospective on the work of Max Born, Pascual Jordan and Werner Heisenberg during the period 1925‑1927.

Glyphemics note: For purposes of our retrospective, one may read h and h‑bar (ℏ) and ℏ/2 all as “the same thing” — namely, something on the order of the Planck constant, 6.6´10^–34. And for our purposes, the following equations may likewise be regarded as “the same thing”: Dx·Dp ³ ℏ/2 and Dp·Dq ³ ℏ/2 and even this funny little guy: p₁q₁ ~ h, which was Heisenberg’s way of introducing his Faelled Park epiphany to the world. (For more about the symbology mess, see Appendix A.)

Along with the Born/Jordan/Heisenberg centennial idea, part of the motivation here was to document the pushback by working physicists against Capra (1975) and Zukav (1979), whose New Age philosophy was celebrated anew circa 2001, as if Berkeley Hippie Daoism were still the order of the day, even in this century. Since that concern of mine is a “downer,” I confine most of it to Appendix B.

To get started, here is the title of Heisenberg’s landmark paper that appeared in Zeitschr. Phys. 43 (1927) 172‑198: Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik. The term anschaulichen appears not only in the title but in a half‑dozen other places in his paper; i.e., it’s important. Despite the fact that anschaulichen has several dictionary glosses including ‘illustrative, graphic, vivid…’, to some it seems untranslatable — along the lines of Zeitgeist or Gestalt, I suppose. Whereupon they blithely introduce a word of their own choosing to replace it. For example, in the ntrs.NASA.gov translation (1983), the phrase anschaulichen Inhalt is rendered as ‘actual content,’ and in the translation of J.A.W. and W.H.Z. (1981), it is rendered as ‘physical content.’ In blessed contrast to such finagling, we find that Crease and Mann (1996, p. 66) have given anschaulichen Inhalt a perfectly reasonable translation, as follows:

On the Visualizable Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics

Fine. But this leads immediately to new questions: Why is Heisenberg of all people — known until this very moment in 1927 for his recondite matrix‑mechanics — now intent on pushing this rather Schrödingeresque aspect of quantum theory? And to what extent is this ‘content’ of quantum theory really ‘visualizable’? The first question has been addressed already, by way of the “Quadrille Dance & Shotgun Wedding.” Now for the second question: Just how visualizable is this stuff (Dq·Dp ³ ℏ/2) anyway?

Since the subatomic realm is alien to us as general readers, let’s see if it’s possible to start with an example “up here” in the macroscopic world. Something about a race car being tested on a track in the hinterlands of Nevada, for example. One suspects early on that this will result somehow in nonsense, but s/he feels compelled to at least give it a try. Suppose we are interested in the car’s position at time t, and also its speed at that moment. Thus far, we know that our error in determining its position has been, say, ±0.25 miles, just to pick a number. And our error in measuring its speed has thus far been around ±2 MPH. Let’s multiply those two values together, in imitation of ‘Dq·Dp’ (in one of the many incarnations of ‘the’ HUP equation). This is the result: 0.25*2.0 = 0.5.

Next, let’s “test” that result (ha‑ha) against the Planck constant, which is on the order of
6.6´10^–34 joule‑seconds: 0.5 >> 0.000000000000000000000000000000000662607015
(where ‘>>’ means ‘much greater than’). Sure enough, the value 0.5 passes this test of an A³B inequality. It passes so easily that the whole business looks ludicrous. It seems we would be free to make endless adjustments to obtain more and more accurate location measurements and speed measurements (e.g., with Dq narrowed from 0.25 to 0.11 and with Dp narrowed from 2.0 to 0.33, so that 0.11*0.33 = 0.0363), with no fear of ever coming anywhere near the Planck constant, our presumed ‘hinge’‑value. (For moral support, I tracked down a similar example in McQuarrie, p. 35. His example, with a baseball, is more technical and less silly than mine, but written in the same spirit: we’re trying to show: What Dp·Dq ³ ℏ/2 Really Says.)

How, then, do we make the h‑test meaningful, so that we can credit it as having been the very centerpiece of Heisenberg’s 1927 paper? For the test to become meaningful, one needs to append a footnote stating that this very special inequality (A³B) pertains only to values for Dq and Dp which are already in the ultra‑tiny neighborhood of the hinge‑value, h, itself. Only then can we think of examples where a slight improvement in Dq (i.e., a tiny reduction in its value) would dictate a corresponding degradation in Dp (i.e., a forced increase in its value) in order to keep their product (Dp·Dq) greater than h. That would be the HUP in action, where the price of increased sharpness for q is a bit of blurriness for p, and vice versa.

And, yes, having worked through the race‑car example (silly though it is), we begin to appreciate that the relation Dq·Dp ³ ℏ/2 might be comparatively “visualizable” when placed beside its 1925‑1926 predecessor, pq ‑ qp = h/2pi. N.B. In the latter, the ‘p’ is not speed or momentum but an entire momentum‑matrix, and q is not position but an entire position‑matrix; also, the subtext for ‘pq ‑ qp’ is that matrices p and q are noncommutative. Moreover, for any values chosen, when performing the indicated matrix multiplication and arithmetic subtraction, one always gets h/2pi as the result (after Feynman 1965, III‑20‑17 and Crease/Mann, 1994, pp. 50, 61‑62). Saying it another way, rather than being “put into” the equation as a controlling hinge‑value (as for Dq·Dp ³ ℏ/2) the value h/2pi is something that “comes out” of the pq ‑ qp equation automatically. Even for those who lived and breathed matrices back then, this idea that h/2pi was the “answer” for any and all cases of pq ‑ qp was found to be wholly unvisualizable, not to mention weird AF. In 1927, the miracle of Dq·Dp ³ ℏ/2 effectively solved that oppressive pq ‑ qp riddle.

Whence Sommerfeld’s ‘Blurriness‑Relation’?

In Sommerfeld 1939, II:196, we find Dx referred to as „Ortsunschärfe“ (location‑blurriness) and Dp_x referred to as Impulsunschärfe (momentum‑blurriness). The first of these two terms he places in scare‑quotes, as if to flag the novelty of his usage or coinage. The cognate term, schärfe, means ‘sharp,’ so unschärfe means ‘blurry,’ as in the Unschärfe‑Relation (Blurriness‑Relation), which is the heading Sommerfeld uses for this whole section (§6, II:196‑201). Disregarding Heisenberg’s own way of referring to the famous relation, which is simply the aforementioned “Eq(1): p₁q₁ ~ h,” Sommerfeld introduces it this way instead: Wir werden beweisen, daß immer Dx·Dp_x ³ ℏ (1939, II:197). Translation: We will prove that always Dx·Dp_x ³ ℏ [ i.e., that the multiplied product of the location‑blurriness and momentum‑blurriness exceeds the reduced Planck constant].

Glimpses of a German/English Telephone Game

The word Ungenauigkeit occurs in Heisenberg’s Abstract, and in the text on pp. 173, 179‑181, 186, 188, 196, 197 and 198. I.e., this word seems to be at least as important as anschaulichen, discussed earlier. Let’s look at some of its translations. In the ntrs.NASA.gov translation of Heisenberg’s Abstract, we find Ungenauigkeit rendered as ‘uncertainty.’ In the J.A.W. and W.H.Z. translation, it is rendered as ‘indeterminacy’ in the Abstract and as ‘uncertainty’ in the text. Meanwhile, Ungenauigkeit has only one possible meaning in German, not three; it means ‘inaccuracy,’ with no second or third definition.

These examples of how Ungenauigkeit has sometimes been “translated” reveal part of the slow‑motion telephone game by which the Anglophone world acquired the term ‘Uncertainty Principle’ even though Heisenberg himself called it the “p₁q₁ ~ h relation” and for Sommerfeld it was a matter of Unbestimmtheit (indeterminacy) or the Unschärfe‑Relation (Blurriness Relation), not the Unsicherheitsprinzip (Uncertainty Principle). Exception: the term Unsicherheitsprinzip, does occur once in Heisenberg’s Postscript in Proof, focused on Bohr. Also, with somewhat less relevance, the term Unsicherheitsprinzip is seen, going the other way, from English to German, in one of the five dictionaries surveyed below.

Earlier we noted the term „Ortsunschärfe“ which was introduced by Sommerfeld on p. 196. Let’s see how Google Translate renders it in 2025. Not as ‘spatial blurriness’ (its only legitimate gloss) but as ‘spatial uncertainty,’ a slithery kind of non‑gloss. Why do that? In this special case, one might say that the telephone game has “turned back on itself” to corrupt the source language, German, from outside of its own borders. Easy enough for this to occur, sans complaints, since German scarcely has the prestige it enjoyed up until the 1940s. (For an example of a telephone game in which a chemist’s most important words were progressively degraded via German “translations” and English “translations” from Russian over a span of 150 years before anyone noticed or cared, see my article entitled, “Mendeleev’s Elemental Ontology and its Philosophical Renditions in German and English,” HYLE ‑ International J. for Phil. of Chem. 25, 2019, 49‑70.)

Dictionary survey

For the English term “uncertainty principle,” what is the German equivalent? Here are some answers according to various on‑line dictionaries, with my own notes/comments in square brackets:

dict.leo.org:

die Unschärferelation [literally, ‘blurriness relation’, echoing Sommerfeld’s §6 heading]
das Unbestimmtheitsprinzip [literally, ‘indeterminacy principle’]
Heisenbergsche Unschärferelation
Heisenbergsche Unbestimmtheitsrelation [literally, ‘indeterminacy relation’]

collinsdictionary.com/us/translator:

Unbestimmtheitsrelation [matches the 4th entry in dict.leo.org listed above]

dictionary.cambridge.org/us/translate:

Unbestimmtheitsrelation [ditto]

Google Translate:

Unschärferelation [agrees with 1st and 3rd entries in dict.leo.org, as annotated above]

en.langenscheidt.com:

Unsicherheitsprinzip [odd man out; see comments below ]

General comment on the dictionary entries summarized above. On the Anglophone side, life is simple: There is only ever just the ‘Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle’ to talk about (ad nauseam, some would say). Meanwhile, on the German side, confusion reigns. I find it rather sad, even touching, how it plays out in German (via my random sample of five on‑line dictionaries above) where one might sense a lingering sentiment that Unsicherheitsprinzip is not right, i.e., something ‘off’ or foreign — except at en.langenscheidt.com, where they allow an English tail to wag the German dog. Meanwhile, the prestige of Germany, a nation that has been slowly committing suicide ever since Hitler, will never be strong enough to set things right again.

Why does the nomenclature matter?

The term ‘information theory’ was coined for the sake of mass‑market appeal or ‘sexiness’ not to be found in the real thing, viz., Shannon’s mathematical theory of data‑communication technology. Shannon’s work is confined to the level of bits, bytes and the stillborn lexeme while ‘information theory’ suggests that Shannon did his work at the very highest tier of the linguistic hierarchy and beyond. Similar concerns would have been at work when it came to the question of how to present Heisenberg’s 1927 result in the Anglophone context.

The term ‘Indeterminacy’ (from Unbestimmtheit) would have been rejected for sounding too technical, and having too many syllables. (Unbestimmtheit occurs in Heisenberg on p. 179, along with „schärfere“ Bestimmung von p und q: “ ‘sharper’ determination of p and q.” In his Abstract, Heisenberg uses this phrase: “… nür mit einer charakteristischen Ungenauigkeit bestimmt werden “…can only be determined with a characteristic inaccuracy.” No sex appeal there.)

‘Blurriness Relation’ (from Sommerfeld’s Unschärfe‑Relation), if indeed it was ever considered, would have been rejected for being undignified, and not sounding technical enough. In contrast, ‘Uncertainty Principle’ strikes the Goldilocks chord: it is serious enough to be respectable, yet vague enough to make philosophizers feel welcome at the scientists’ table. Like ‘information theory,’ it exudes just the right degree of sexiness to attract the liberal arts professor. Thus, it is a perennial magnet for authors eager to “rush in where angels fear to tread,” and have a go — even in the XXI century — at the type of program carried out by New Agers Capra and Zukav in the 1970s with dubious results.

From one viewpoint, my issue about the term ‘Uncertainty Principle’ may be dismissed as trivial. It is, after all, just a label, and in the literature for any field, there will be some legacy nomenclature that looks odd or even absurd, but one soon acquiesces to it and moves on. So the argument would go. But I regard ‘Information Theory’ and the ‘Uncertainty Principle’ as special cases because they have resulted in the spread of pernicious factoids far beyond the boundaries of their respective fields. Cf. Lederman/Teresi, pp. 189‑190, and related passages in Appendix B.

Full disclosure: As some may have guessed already, I do not “know German.” I felt comfortable dealing with individual lexical items above because of a project I undertook during 2012‑2013, construction of a full‑fledged German‑English dictionary that I called Kindred German/Exotic German. It contains 6,649 German words, divided into ‘Kindred’ words (numbering 4,502) and ‘Exotic’ words (numbering 2,147), with an Index containing 13,000 English entries. For a member of Kindred group, one can find (or strongly suspect) an English cognate; for a member of the Exotic group, no such cognate can possibly be imagined (e.g., after consulting Duden Band 7, Das Herkunftswörterbuch 2006). Kindred German/Exotic German is an unpublished MS, available on request as a 4.6 MB pdf with extensive (internal) hyperlinks.

Introducing Parth G. The lexical facet of the HUP is the only one I felt competent to discuss above. Had I felt comfortable venturing into the world of Fourier‑transforms (known superficially to music majors as “why a tuba sounds like a tuba and not like an oboe”), I might have focused instead on the following question: Is it just that there are clear parallels between the HUP and the time‑frequency relation as illuminated by Fourier transformations OR, is the HUP a special Earthbound case of the pervasive time‑frequency relation? This latter view puts an end to those tedious discussions about the Copenhagen Interpretation; and “observers” (even at the Big Bang? some pesky critics ask); and God rolling dice? — all of which can be seen now as anthropocentric Earthling‑talk, nothing to do with the Universe. For starting down the Fourier path, I recommend the presentation given by Parth G (see Appendix C: References). Parth asserts that Heisenberg meant his talk about Equation (1) p₁q₁ ~ h only as an analogy, a thought‑experiment for trying to convey to others the flavor of his Faelled Park epiphany. In that connection, note how Heisenberg himself wraps up the whole discussion by saying that his fundamental Equation (1) contains only a qualitative statement: [D]ie fundamentale Gleichung (1) nur eine qualitative Aussage enthält; Heisenberg 1927, p. 196.

[And] here’s the clincher: The wave function for a particle’s momentum is the Fourier transform of the wave function for the particle’s position. In other words, if the wave function for a particle’s momentum is wide […] then the wave function for the particle’s momentum is narrow. [This is] a fundamental property of the universe, and it’s got nothing to do with our measurement apparatus, our current technology or our intelligence level. It’s just a property of the universe. —Parth G @12:51‑13:35.
Also, “In Heisenberg’s analogy, the meaning of Dx is ‘measurement error’ but really it is the inherent width of a probability distribution”; my paraphrase of related comments by Parth.

The next step, after Parth G, might be to explore the question and four answers found at physics.stackexchange.com/questions/718659 (see Appendix C).

 

Appendix A: Notes about those pesky variations in the h and p and q symbology

In the literature, on the right‑hand side of the Blurriness‑Relation one might see plain h (i.e., in Heisenberg: p₁q₁ ~ h); OR, h‑bar (ℏ), e.g., in Sommerfeld; OR, h‑bar over two (ℏ/2) — in most present‑day presentations. Also, one might even see different forms employed within the same work, e.g., on p. 35 of his Quantum Chemistry textbook, McQuarrie starts with DxDp ³ h (plain h), but on pp. 112 and 156 he introduces ℏ/2, and on p. 113 he notes that: “[All such equations are controlled by a number] on the order of the Planck constant,” my emphasis. In the essay, I regard plain h as the stand‑in for any and all of the above. Also, I employ Dq·Dp ³ ℏ/2 in preference to Dx·Dp ³ ℏ/2 (with ‘x’ for position), which latter form is the one most commonly seen nowadays. Why write it my way? So that the interconnections between ‘Dq·Dp ³ ℏ/2’ and ‘p₁q₁ ~ h’ and ‘pq ‑ qp = h/2pi’ are immediately evident, with no guesswork required: position is represented by q; momentum is represented by p; end of story. Historical note: Again, in the Heisenberg article itself, one might be surprised to learn that we find only this version of the equation: p₁q₁ ~ h. (He introduces it on p. 175, preceded by pq ‑ qp = h/2pi.) Present‑day Dx·Dp ³ ℏ/2 appears nowhere in Heisenberg 1927; however, something close to it is seen in Sommerfeld 1939: Dx·Dp_x ³ ℏ (II:197). As for the 1925‑1926 riddle‑equation, that one appears in Sommerfeld like this: p_xx ‑ xp_x = ℏ/i (II:189).

Appendix B: Overview of Capra/Zukav‑ism of the New Age era (1970s)

Preface. Granted, Capra and Zukav both have substantive background in physics, but they sometimes use that technical background in ways that are absurd or misleading to the reader. Below is a sampling of how some working physicists have reacted to Capra/Zukav‑ism, and to other aspects of 1970s New Age‑ism.

“There has been a spate of books over the past several years — The Tao of Physics is another example [along with Zukav’s Dancing Wu[‑]Li Masters, cited earlier] — that attempt to explain modern physics in terms of Eastern religion and mysticism. The authors are apt to conclude rapturously that we are all part of the cosmos and the cosmos is part of us. […] The inspiration for such books is usually quantum theory and its inherent spookiness. […] Normally, one wouldn’t care about such books if they were found in the religion, paranormal, or poltergeist sections of bookstores. Unfortunately, they are often placed in the science category”; excerpt from “The Dancing Moo‑Shu Masters” in Lederman/Teresi, pp. 189‑190.

“As a literary agent, [John Brockman] had made a killing representing writers like Fritjov Capra, best known for The Tao of Physics, and Gary Zukav, author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, books Murray [Gell‑Mann] disdained because they seemed to take seriously his whimsical reference to Buddhism in the Eightfold Way. Didn’t they know he was joking?”; Johnson 1999, p. 335.

Regarding the 太極圖 tàijí-tú on Bohr’s coat of arms, compare the account in Capra 1975, pp. 158‑160, with that given by Pais 1991, pp. 23‑24. The former seems cloying and built partly on assumptions; Pais’s is a more nuanced and objective account of the same events, one that I find more believable. As for the tàijí-tú itself (aka the Yin‑Yang symbol), it clearly overlaps to some degree with Bohr’s complementarity principle, but that’s different from claiming that it is his principle, or that it miraculously anticipates it by 22 centuries. (If curious to know how Yin and Yang make their appearance in the Daoist classics themselves, see Mair 1990, pp. 9 and 108, and 1994, pp. 95 and 96.)

 

“[W]e cannot say when [an atom in an excited state] will emit the photon. […] This has given rise to all kinds of nonsense and questions on the meaning of freedom of will, and of the idea that the world is uncertain”; Feynman 1965, III‑2‑9, emphasis added.

“The uncertainty principle, when discussed by itself outside the framework of quantum mechanics, is often assigned a profundity and depth which are probably unjustified […] [I]t may be viewed as just one more aspect of the wave nature of matter, in which case it seems considerably less mysterious […] Uncertainty of measurement arises essentially from the nonlocalizability of waves”; Ford 1963, pp. 74‑76, emphasis added.

The italicized part above is ironic since — through no fault of his own — it was precisely Kenneth Ford (one of the Los Alamos physicists) who inspired much of Capra 1975 and Zukav 1979, each in turn — with Zukav not even acknowledging the amazing “coincidence” that he, just like Capra four years earlier, took inspiration from the diagram on the cover of Ford’s book.

That diagram appears inside the volume itself as Figure 7.11(d), where it is described as the depiction of “a single isolated proton” (Ford, p. 108). The idea is that this single proton, seen first at the bottom of the diagram, flickers in and out of existence by way of various “virtual particles” represented by n, p̄, p⁺, etc. before it regains its identity as a proton, p, at the very top of the diagram. To the New Agers of the 1970s, the diagram on the cover conveyed a clear message: We all live in Flitter‑World, a blur of phantasmagoric nothings, the meaninglessness of which was already proved long ago by the Zen Masters. What the fans of Ford’s cover design failed to consider is this: Suppose that same proton was not isolated but happened to be part of an atomic nucleus, inside an ingot of, say, bismuth? The expected longevity of bismuth is 2.7´10¹⁹ years, which is to say about two billion times the age of universe itself (13.7´10⁹ years) as currently calculated. Far from being flittery and evanescent, a proton generally would be much better described as Stable and Eternal. This is the part of physics that the New Agers and Hippies either didn’t know about or didn’t want to know about, since it would have clashed with their California Buddhism dogma (though not with certain precepts of Hinduism, by the way).

 

“[T]here is another startling implication in the uncertainty principle […] this thing that we have been calling a moving particle, whatever it is, is not the ‘moving particle’ we thought it was, because ‘moving particles’ always have both position and momentum.” This is excerpted from Zukav 1979, p. 126, where he then cites Max Born (1957) in support of his assertion.

Feynman would disagree with Zukav and Born immediately above. “Just because we cannot measure position and momentum precisely [both at once] does not a priori mean that we cannot talk about them”; Feynman 1965, III‑2‑8. (Or, to put it in slightly stronger terms, I would say: Just because we cannot measure its position [precisely] at time t, why then jump to the conclusion that the particle lacks a position at time t? Isn’t that anthropocentric?)

One Stop Shopping: On p. 192 in Capra, one can find “everything wrong with Capra/Zukav-ism of the 1970s.” To wit, a blithe assumption that physics, when scrutinized at the subatomic level, somehow delivers a Big Message regarding life up here at the macroscopic level. Why? And, earlier on the same page, we find the notion that Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists are all exponents of this one thing called Eastern Mysticism (which waits with bated breath to be told, “You, Eastern Mysticism, anticipated my Western Science by millennia. Good job!”) When in fact those belief systems are very different, just as The Three Stooges, for example, have three distinct personalities. (Just for fun, let’s align Moe, Curly and Larry with Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, shall we?)

 

Appendix C: Informal list of References

Capra, F. 2010[1975]. The Tao of Physics. An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism.

Crease, R., Mann, C. 1996. The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth‑Century Physics.

Feynman, R., Leighton/Sands, ed. 1965. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III.

Heisenberg, W. “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik”, Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927), 172‑198.

J.A.W. and W.H.Z. 1981, translation to English of Heisenberg (1927), taking this as their source: Dokumente der Naturwissenschaft 4 (1963) 9‑35.

Johnson, G. 1999. Strange Beauty: Murray Gell‑Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth‑Century Physics

Lederman/Teresi. 1994. The God Particle.

Mair, V. 1990. Tao Te Ching.

______. 1994. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu.

McQuarrie, D. 2008. Quantum Chemistry. Second Edition.

NASA TM‑77379 (Technical Memorandum), 1983, translation to English of Heisenberg (1927), no translator’s name given. Available at ntrs.NASA.gov/citations/19840008978.

Pais, A. 1986. Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World

______. 1991. Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity.

Parth G “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle explained [in terms of Fourier transforms],” youtube: iZ96TuP_veY, 2019, duration 14:42.

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/718659/what-relationship-if-any-exists-between-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle-and [the general wave principle expressed in terms of Fourier transforms]?

Sommerfeld, A. Atombau und Spektrallinien (Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines), II. Band (1929), 2. Auflage (1939), §6, pp. 196‑201: Unschärfe‑Relation [the Blurriness Relation of Heisenberg 1927].

Zukav, G. 2001[1979]. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. An Overview of the New Physics.

 

——————

Selected readings

• "geheuer und Ungeheuer" (3/24/25) — on the prevalence and multivalence of "Un-"
• "WU2WEI2: Do Nothing" (3/10/09) — physics and metaphysics

March 25, 2025 @ 8:50 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Dictionaries, Language and science, Lexicon and lexicography, Translation, Vocabulary

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