When limits are mistaken for properties
With Werner Heisenberg, quantum theory stops pretending that description is transparent. Measurement no longer reveals what was already there; it intervenes. The concepts of classical physics — position, momentum, trajectory — cannot all be applied at once. Something gives way.
Of all the architects of quantum theory, Heisenberg comes closest to a genuinely relational insight.
And it is precisely for that reason that his misstep is the most consequential.
Indeterminacy as Breakthrough
Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations are often summarised as a technical result. That summary misses their force.
What Heisenberg shows is not merely that measurements are imprecise, but that the conditions of application of concepts are constrained. The very attempt to ascribe determinate values to certain pairs of quantities fails — not because of experimental inadequacy, but because the concepts cannot jointly function.
This is a collapse of classical description.
Importantly, Heisenberg does not initially frame this as ignorance. The indeterminacy is not a gap to be filled by better instruments. It is structural.
So far, the move is radical — and promising.
Epistemic or Ontological?
The danger enters quietly.
Heisenberg repeatedly vacillates between two readings of indeterminacy:
-
Epistemic:Indeterminacy reflects limits on what can be known or said.
-
Ontological:Indeterminacy reflects a fundamental “fuzziness” in reality itself.
The slide between these readings is subtle, and historically understandable. But it is not innocent.
Once indeterminacy is treated as ontological — as something the electron has — the limit of description is reified into a property of objects.
The world becomes blurry.
The Temptation to Reify Limits
This reply captures the bind.
Heisenberg sees that classical description fails. But rather than rethinking the relation between theory and phenomenon, he relocates the failure into the world. The uncertainty relations become statements about what exists, not about what can be actualised as an event.
Indeterminacy becomes ontic fuzz.
From a relational standpoint, this is a category error.
The Relational Cut
Relational ontology offers a different articulation of what Heisenberg uncovered.
Indeterminacy is not:
-
a temporal fluctuation
-
a lack of information
-
a smeared-out property of objects
It is a perspectival constraint on instantiation.
A system, understood as a theory of possible instances, cannot be cut in all ways at once. Certain distinctions exclude others. Not because reality is fuzzy, but because instantiation is selective.
Crucially:
Instantiation is not a temporal process.
There is no evolving state that gradually sharpens or blurs. There is only the cut — the event — in which certain determinations become actualised and others do not.
Heisenberg’s error is to imagine indeterminacy as something that persists through time between measurements, rather than as a constraint on what can be instantiated at all within a given construal.
When Limits Become Properties
Once indeterminacy is treated as ontological, several familiar problems arise:
-
What is indeterminate between measurements?
-
How does fuzz collapse into definiteness?
-
How does a vague reality produce sharp events?
These are not deep mysteries. They are artefacts of the mistake.
They arise only if limits of description are treated as properties of systems evolving in time.
Relational ontology dissolves the problem by refusing that reification. The limit belongs to the cut, not to an underlying process.
Heisenberg’s Achievement — and His Halt
Here is the final divergence.
Heisenberg correctly identifies incompatibility. But he attributes it to nature rather than to the relation between construal and instantiation. In doing so, he preserves the representational ambition of physics even as he undermines its classical vocabulary.
He stands closer to relational ontology than any of his contemporaries so far — and yet he stops short of its decisive move.
He lets indeterminacy become a thing.
What Heisenberg Leaves Unfinished
Heisenberg reveals that physics cannot speak from nowhere. Description is constrained, selective, and mutually exclusive.
What he does not allow is the final step:
that those constraints are not facts about the world,but facts about how worlds become available as events.
And recognising that requires letting go — not of determinacy — but of the idea that description mirrors being.
With Heisenberg, quantum theory arrives at the edge of a relational ontology — and recoils.
The next conversation will be with the figure who comes closest to standing on that edge without retreating, even if he refuses to step across it.
Next: Niels Bohr — Complementarity and the Phenomenon
No comments:
Post a Comment