The Uncertainty Principle Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [2]

Hawking (1988: 172-3):

We now know that Laplace’s hopes of determinism cannot be realised, at least in the terms he had in mind. The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics implies that certain pairs of quantities, such as the position and velocity of a particle, cannot both be predicted with complete accuracy.

Quantum mechanics deals with this situation via a class of quantum theories in which particles don’t have well-defined positions and velocities but are represented by a wave. These quantum theories are deterministic in the sense that they give laws for the evolution of the wave with time. Thus if one knows the wave at one time, one can calculate it at any other time. The unpredictable, random element comes in only when we try to interpret the wave in terms of the positions and velocities of particles. But maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the wave model represents the quantum system as potential, quantified as probabilities. The evolution of such a wave is thus the evolution of the system probabilities. Interpreting the wave in terms of positions and velocities of particles is construing instances of that probabilistic potential. The uncertainty is thus inherent in the system as potential, rather than in its instantiations as particle positions and velocities.