2: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
A lot of people love to jump all over Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and say that the fact that we can’t measure all the properties of a subatomic particle at the same time, and the fact that everything in the world is made up of subatomic particles, proves we can’t be certain of anything. And other people say that the fact that subatomic particles seem to appear and disappear at random proves we can’t be certain of anything. And other people go so far as to say that we can’t be certain of anything because we can’t measure anything without changing it.
Well despite what those people say, you can be certain of the Periodic Table of the Elements. That was discovered independently of subatomic physics. Even if particles do act completely at random—as opposed to acting according to laws of cause and effect that physicists have yet to discover—randomness cancels out. Whatever one particle is doing at random, some other particle is doing the opposite of that. And that’s how randomly acting particles all add up to the reliable predictions of the Periodic Table of the Elements.
The Periodic Table of the Elements is a collection of a certain type of facts. These are known as first principles. A first principle is a rule that scientists have discovered to apply universally to an area of study.
Dr. Wilson’s goal of Consilience has been greatly advanced by the discovery of five first principles that connect different fields of science. Chemistry has been connected to biology, biology has been connected to psychology, and ecology—which is a branch of biology—has been connected to chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Each of these discoveries is not the kind of discovery you memorize, but the discovery of a perspective you can use to interpret information and convert between one field and another.
All of these five first principles are different manifestations of two mathematical laws: entropy and stability. Change makes things spread out. Whenever you have a large group of things, like molecules, cells, people, or ideas, the more changes you introduce to the group, the more different results you get. The soles of your shoes are thinner now than they were when they were brand new, because with every step you take you’re adding friction to their bottom-most molecules. That change you have introduced has spread the molecules of your shoes out into a trail of microscopic dust that follows you everywhere you go. Once upon a time, the molecules in your shoes were concentrated into one place, but the more friction you add, the more places those molecules end up.
Out of all the possible results of changes, some create patterns that resist further change. That’s why some kinds of rocks erode more slowly than others. A few patterns not only resist change but also create more patterns. And that brings me to evolution…