The Uncertainty Principle

The word “uncertainty” causes anxiety in a lot of people. Perhaps they feel that we are living in especially uncertain times and being reminded of that is hard for them. But the way that God designed the world of the very, very small — the world of electrons, for instance — makes clear that He is in charge of absolutely everything. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely everything. (I chose the words “in charge” rather than “in control” because God allows mankind to have control in some instances.)

In 1927, a physicist named Werner Heisenberg identified a way that particles such as electrons behave. He recorded an equation that expressed what he had learned. It is called the Uncertainty Principle. The equation is this: (dx)(dp)=h/(4pi). Okay, that’s nice, you might be thinking, but what does it mean? Essentially, it means that humans can’t be sure of the future. Not ever.

This is the bare bones of the mathematics, which has been well-tested and reliably observed in physics experiments: if we know where a particle such as an electron is or if we know that particle’s velocity, then even if we know the forces that are affecting its motion, we still don’t know where the electron will be in the future. In fact, we can’t know both where a particle is and what its velocity is.

When Heisenberg first published his findings, many physicists were quite disturbed. Why? Before that time, it was thought that if you knew all of the details of a physical situation, you could calculate the future; if you knew that a falling feather had a certain amount of gravitational force acting upon it and certain wind patterns blowing it around and a certain structure making it vulnerable to those winds, you could calculate when it would touch the ground. It was thought that the laws of physics determined the future (physically). You just had to know everything.

To try to get a handle on the math of the uncertainty principle, physicists used probabilities. It was said, for example, that an electron had such and such a probability of being here or there going this or that velocity, but it could never be known. From that time, everything happening at the atomic level would be surrounded by an air of mystery.

Another way that the uncertainty principle has been expressed is this: a particle has been described to be in a superposition of many possible states (including position and velocity) all at the same time. One example is that electrons in orbit around an atomic nucleus were no longer described as being in well-defined orbits. They were described as being embodied in an electron “cloud” of all of their possible orbits, all at once.

Which brings us to particle-wave duality. Physicists realized that particles of matter such as electrons acted like waves (like sound) when their position wasn’t measured. But when they were observed to be in a certain location, they acted like discrete particles rather than waves. So, only an observer can nail down where a particle is, and when that happens, all of those previously possible paths collapses into one path (for an instant, anyway). All that you had to do was to interrupt a particle in its action and observe its location, and what was uncertain before was now certain. It was, so to say, decided.

The beautiful thing about this is that God has the power of decision. He can interrupt any particle that He wants to at any time and change uncertainty into certainty, prediction and probability into history. This is the lesson: only God knows where everything is and only God knows where everything is going and only God makes the final decision about what is real. Ultimately, reality is not ours to determine, it is God’s.

To prayer we go, then. To prayer we go.