Having identified the last subsection of this Genius section as Science And Wisdom, it is only appropriate to conclude it with the very interesting figure of Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976), who, unlike a large majority of the men of genius, whom I have been writing about, is a person entirely of the twentieth century, and thus of my own time. There are several aspects of his biography, which call for a special attention. A Nobel Laureate in Physics at the age of thirty, he participated in Hitler’s nuclear program, but was not too much compromised by this association, and after the end of World War II remained in his native Germany until his death, holding prominent academic positions and enjoying his lifetime hobby as a classical pianist and music aesthete. He was also a lifelong philosopher, who literally fused his philosophy with his science, and it is this interest of his that constitutes the main reason why I have singled him out for this subsection of my Genius section. I will be saying more about this later in this entry.
As always, this is not a biographical entry, and I am happy to send the reader for more regular information on Heisenberg to standard biographical sources. But there are certain things of special interest to me, and these are the ones I want to focus on.
Although Max Planck is recognized as the progenitor of the quantum theory, Heisenberg revolutionized its science, creating a totally original theory introducing matrices instead of ‘normal’ physical variables. There are some scientific reference sources representing the birth of quantum mechanics as a collaborative effort, but if we follow it through the eyes of the Nobel Committee, there are just these two names at its source. In Planck’s case, he is credited as the father of the quantum theory, whereas to Heisenberg belong the parental rights to quantum mechanics. To be specific, Planck’s 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded, according to the Nobel Committee, for “the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta.” Heisenberg’s 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics was “for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.” Both these Nobels were unshared, and the next mention of quantum in Nobel awards dates forward to 1954.
In 1927 Heisenberg formulated his indeterminacy (or uncertainty) principle, describing the theoretical limitations derived from his quantum mechanics on such interacting variables of particles as their position and momentum. Presenting these two as “conjugate observables,” we find that no particle can simultaneously register an exact position and exact momentum. Whenever one of them is exact, the other is indeterminate.
It is important to note that the philosophical principle of indeterminacy dates back long before Heisenberg, and Nietzsche, in particular, was its most eloquent proponent. With Heisenberg, this concept gets a unique physical illustration, which is so original and so scientifically revolutionary that it is impossible to call his discovery philosophically derivative, by which criterion all philosophers without exception should be called derivative, just because they necessarily operate with concepts inherited from their predecessors.
Once again, there are rather confusing references to a collective origin of Heisenberg’s philosophy, but the fact that the earliest discovery in 1927 belongs to him alone, is pretty well established. It was only later, as he proceeded to take his quantum principle of uncertainty to the next step known as the philosophy of complementarity, where a fascinated Niels Bohr eagerly joined him for the ride, where the collective effort can be said to begin. Complementarity starts with the observable fact that, under the new principle of physical indeterminacy, the objective physical values of particle variables wholly depend on the subjective method of their measurement by this or that scientist. Now, this was an incredibly fruitful discovery, which allowed Heisenberg and Bohr to conclude that the physical particle under consideration is not a ‘Ding an-Sich,’ but a function of a scientist’s measurement, thus dependent on the subjective choice of the scientist in question.
There are two points, which, in my mind, give the philosophy of complementarity a legitimacy that cannot be disputed. Firstly, thus engaged in philosophical contemplation, a scientist’s theory does not have to, nor should ever even try to, pretend to possess a universal and comprehensive application. But it does have full legitimacy in its specific context, by virtue of having been instrumental in the scientist’s personal scientific thinking, to which he, of course, has an absolute claim.
And, secondly, in view of my principal scientific assertion that at the bottom of any science lies not the so-called observable truth, but a more or less fanciful hypothesis, always reflecting the personal subjectivity of its first positor, the unbreakable link between an original scientific genius and his science can be naturally transferred to the object of his study, thus revealing a certain mystical communion between them, more or less along the lines of the Heisenberg-Bohr complementarity principle.
Interestingly, this new philosophy, rather than being applauded for its intellectual daring, was immediately and flatly rejected by other authorities in the field of physics, including Schrödinger, and De Broglie among those of course who cared, and were themselves concerned with matters transcending the bare essentials of narrow-minded science. But, alas, these illustrious critics did not rise to a formulation of a counter-thesis to the Heisenberg-Bohr hypothesis, thus having nothing to offer in its refutation.
By far the most unexpected critic of this hypothesis was Einstein, who famously reacted to it by saying that ‘God does not play dice.’ He of all the rest, having revolutionized science as he did, should have been more tolerant to the concept of complementarity, that is, of dualistic subjectivity fusing the scientist with his science, as he himself had become fused with his theoretical principles.
Back to Heisenberg, the most exciting aspect of his philosophy for me is this concept of complementarity; in other words, his assertion that science does not exist independently from the scientist but in conjunction with him, that is, as one. As far as I am concerned, this is philosophical Marxism pure and simple: Mind is not secondary to matter, but dualistically complementary to it. While mind is surely affected by matter, in Marx’s historic Dasein bestimmt Bewußtsein dictum, it also has the power to affect matter and to change it, according to Marx. This is exactly the same formula along whose lines the complementarity principle has been built, proving, through quantum mechanics, that Marx was conceptually correct. All the more reason for me to regret that our ethical Marxist Einstein failed to see it this way. Apparently, Heisenberg’s physics and Marx’s metaphysics did not “become one” in Einstein’s own mind.
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