Book Review: Uncertainty - Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindley - Page 3

He could not believe that “God” or “the Old One” would create a universe that was not entirely predictable.  It is ironic that one of the great revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century is left an increasingly irrelevant bystander in the development of quantum theory, whose validity experiments and observations continue to confirm to this day.  Great genius that he was, Einstein had his limitations.

Lindley presents all of these men as flawed, human, diverse, and interesting — some are conservative, some verge on Marxism, many left Germany when Hitler came to power (Heisenberg did not), some were womanizers, others were conservative, upright men, some were outspoken and others were reticent.  All were participants in one of the great periods of scientific discovery in modern history. 

In later chapters, Lindley explains the significance of the uncertainty principle to modern science — scientists use it routinely in their research, even if they don’t wholly understand it.  Science, that is, did not end as a result of uncertainty, as some feared.  He also argues that the popularity of modern cultural, philosophical, and literary theories that depend on the notion of uncertainty, randomness, and unpredictability really have no real connection to Heisenberg’s principle, other than the fact that it helped popularize the notion of uncertainty in the 20th century.  Heisenberg provided a metaphor for these theorists, nothing more.  (I especially enjoyed Lindley’s discussion of British novelist’s D. H. Lawrence’s reaction to uncertainty and to modern science in general). 

Lindley also refutes the argument that the willingness of German scientists to accept a theory of uncertainty was their unconscious reaction to the unsettlement and change rampant in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.  Uncertainty was a principle developed as a result of mathematics, scientific inquiry, and thought, not as the result of cultural influences.

David Lindley’s Uncertainty provides a clear, accessible, and highly readable account of how quantum physics developed, of the uncertainty principle, and of the various scientists who were part of its discovery.

Article Author: Hugh Ruppersburg

Hugh Ruppersburg lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

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