From Russell Smith
Huddersfield
I am most surprised to discover that Davies’s article contained no critical
appraisal of attempts to explain the origin of the Universe by applying
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the concept of quantum fluctuations. In
the intellectual chess of cosmological theorising, such a move is both confused
and erroneous, for the following reasons.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is an assertion of the impossibility, in
principle (that is, it is an assertion of metaphysical impossibility), of the
precise and simultaneous measurement of wave and particle properties of
light/matter. His gamma-ray microscope “thought experiment”, by which he sought
to demonstrate the truth of this assertion, also demonstrated that the origin of
this uncertainty is the act of measurement itself: the more precisely one
measures, and thus knows, the position of an electron, the less precisely one
can measure, and thus know, its momentum. As such, the uncertainty principle
cannot rationally be employed where measurement is itself impossible in
principle.
So-called “acausal” quantum fluctuations are submicrophenomena interpreted
via quantum theory’s axiom of probability, conceived as an attempted
mathematical resolution of wave-particle duality. They are, and can only be,
absolutely independent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for this assumes,
and is utterly reliant upon, strict Newtonian causality—as is made evident
by his thought experiment above.
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Moreover, the assertion that there can be no underlying cause for a physical
event is one of pure metaphysics. How can it be open to experimental
confirmation or falsification? Is it not the axiomatisation of scientific
failure—in other words, justifying giving up the ghost by asserting on
faith that failure to find the cause is proof that there is no cause to
find?
Both cosmology and quantum physics claim to have reached the ground-zero of
causality, the former because science has overextended itself by seeking to
construct a whole class of theories, the veracity or otherwise of which lies
beyond the possibility of confirmation/falsification; the latter because science
altered its metaphysical foundations in order to save the appearance of
consistency in the face of the inescapable contradiction (or paradox) of
wave-particle duality.
