The Uncertainty Principle (and, of course, Breaking Bad)

 

a tale of two Heisenbergs...

when i was home a few days ago i started reading Copenhagen.

for some reason, it was just calling to me. i've had it on the shelf for years, one of the select books from college i kept around in arm's reach. i remember being assigned it as reading in one of my core classes (Natural Systems), but never read far before i abandoned it for something else (the only notes i made in the margin ended on page 5, with a blue box around the words "Uncertainty Principle" and "complementarity.")

well, i'd pretty  much forgotten anything and everything about the play until i picked it up and started reading it, and, perhaps due to my brimming obsession with Breaking Bad, have found it more interesting and relevant than before. reading it has made me wonder if perhaps Vince Gilligan was inspired, to some extent, by the work of Michael Frayn and the history of nuclear physics.

the play is nothing but an ongoing theoretical conversation between mentor Niels Bohr, his former student (and now rival physicist) Werner Heisenberg, and Bohr's wife cum secretary Margrethe. it takes place in some future time after all three have passed into the next life and involves a discussion of Heisenberg's (in)famous visit to Copenhagen, the true motives and results of which are unclear to historians and the scientific community. the three actors circle each other throughout the piece (as can be seen in the photo off the cover), as electrons inside an atom, mirroring the atomic physics at the center of their discussion, but also drawing attention to the relationships of individuals/elements to one another.

for people who watch Breaking Bad, this is what comes to mind when we hear "Heisenberg":

volatile, explosive, unpredictable. dangerous. seems to me that Vince Gilligan is very careful and methodical with how he created the world of Walt and Breaking Bad, and it seems unlikely that Walt choosing Heisenberg as his nom de guerre is not mere coincidence but part of Gilligan's elaborate plan.

some interesting overlaps and parallels:
1.  Heisenberg the physicist was recruited by Germany, becoming the youngest professor to work on quantum physics at the university where he began his career, later developing and contributing research to the Nazi regime's atomic bomb program (does this explain the Nazis in Breaking Bad? always thought they were an unexpected curveball at the end of the series)

2.  his mentor, Niels Bohr, was himself a prominent physicist and renowned for his work in nuclear physics, but due to German occupation in his home country of Denmark, was forced to escape extermination

3.  from Copenhagen, page 24:
Bohr talks about Heisenberg's recklessness (while skiing, but also how it reflects his approach to his scientific work): "At the speed you were going you were up against the uncertainty relationship... You never cared what got destroyed on the way, as long as the mathematics worked out you were satisfied."
H: "If something works it works."

4.  page 51, (talking about the arrival of the Allies and the end of the war) Heisenberg: "Under my control -- yes! That's the point! Under my control!"
Bohr: "Nothing was under anyone's control by that time!"

5.  page 74, H: "However we got there, by whatever combination of high principles and low calculation, of most painfully hard thought and most painfully childish tears, it works. It goes on working."

6.  page 75, Margrethe: "Your talent is for skiing too fast for anyone to see where you are. For always being in more than one position at a time, like one of your particles."

7.  page 94, Heisenberg: "Our children and our children's children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment... By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things."

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and finally, these chilling words, written by Frayn, said by Heisenberg, shared by me with you on the eve of the series finale of Breaking Bad:

"I'm your enemy; I'm also your friend. I'm a danger to mankind; I'm also your guest. I'm a particle; I'm also a wave. We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children... All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened."

-Heisenberg (page 77-78)

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happy Breaking Bad finale day, folks! i don't know if it's because it's the last day one of the best things to ever happen to television will be on the air, or the quickly disappearing summer and impending winter, or that it's the last day of my unemployment, but i am filled with a lingering sadness. i am going to miss this Sunday feeling so much.

a scientific inquiry into the varying experience of sunsets over time

Some data:
The sunset time for Fremont, CA (94538) for today, Wednesday Nov. 9, 2011, is 5:01 pm PST.
The sunset time for Los Angeles, CA (90034) is 4:53 pm PST.
The sunset time for Syracuse, NY (13203) is 4:46 pm EST.
The sun sets in Oxford, OH (45056) at 5:28 pm EST.
In Lexington, KY (40512), the sun sets at 5:31 pm EST.
And in Miami, FL (33101), it's 5:34 pm EST.

I'm sure there's a scientific explanation for the variance, like the earth's tilt on its axis and the rotation in relation to the sun, but I'm going to leave it to more scientifically-inclined minds than mine to furnish those reasons. (Did you see how I gave zip codes instead of latitudes and longitudes, which would have proved infinitely more useful in answering this question? Although I did try to arrange those cities in order from North to South.)


All I know is, it gets dark disgustingly early now, and I was correct in thinking that, when growing up in the Midwest, the falls were never so dark, nor the days so short (and unfulfilled) as they are on the west coast. It was not just nostalgia playing a dirty mind trick on me.

intergalactic dust

huzzah, readers! a friend of mine pointed out to me just an hour after my last post that today is Carl Sagan day. so, in honor of our galactic dreamer, i'm posting his famous "Pale Blue Dot" quote about the in/significance of Earth in the broader context of our universe.

to the stars, friends.

-stephan!e

a photograph of Earth from the Voyager spacecraft, taken on its way out of the solar system. Earth is the tiny dot located halfway down inside the brown beam on the right.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.