The textual material on page below is drawn directly from my work A Moral History of Western Society © 2024, Volume Two, pages 130-131.

---

While the more popular world of science was confident that somehow it was increasingly able to bring life under human mastery, another – vastly more esoteric – realm of science was finding itself caught in a discussion, even a debate, about what exactly all of reality was built on.  Interestingly, in the mid-1920s, the great German physicist Albert Einstein and his Danish physicist friend Niels Bohr found themselves in deep debate over the findings of the "quantum revolution" … something that was actually forcing them to reconsider the most fundamental laws of physics … the traditional laws of Newtonian physics that had lesser scientists certain that they not only understood but also could soon control the dynamics of the physical world.
 
Einstein and Bohr – but also others joining them in this debate, such as Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Max Born – found themselves much less certain about the predictability of the world of light, heat, mass, etc. … because the very fundamental nature of the smallest element or quantum of life itself, an energy particle that moved at the speed of light – which Einstein termed a "photon" – was hard to pin down.
 
But … was it in fact a particle – or a wave of energy?  And if a particle, where exactly was it, and where was it headed?  Actually, Einstein and Schrödinger tended to the wave side of the debate … although it was understood by most of this new group of scientists that it could be both!

Heisenberg demonstrated with his "uncertainty principle" that if you could locate its present position, you would be unable to identify its momentum – its speed or trajectory.  Likewise, if you could get a sense of where it was headed and how fast it was moving, you could not simultaneously locate its present position.  You could compute one or the other, position or momentum, but not both at the same time!  It was thus a most "uncertain" matter!

Worse, the very act of the observer investigating the photon and its dynamics would itself impact those dynamics, prejudicing the outcome of the experiment (the "observer effect")!

Thus physics found itself working not with exact measurements, but only with probabilities of small variances in its calculations.  True, those probabilistic variances were very, very tiny.  But they were variances nonetheless!  

Wow!  There went the world of exact science out the window!

Of course, this was such an esoteric matter that it had almost no impact on the world of popular science at the time … so certain was the world of popular science that it was on the edge of bringing life under full human mastery.  There was no "probability" about that.  That was a matter of absolute certainty!

But life was soon, once again, to undermine the cultural world of intellectual certainty.

Albert Einstein (1921)

Niels Bohr (1922)

Werner Heisenberg (1933)

Erwin Schrödinger (1933)

For more on Einstein

Go on to the next section:  Depression and Dictatorship

  Miles H. Hodges