M&D: Cowart article/ch.35

[Paul Mackin]

So, is Heisenberg more widely applicable than might have been thought?
Extending to history and p-novels--where, at best, we can only have
wave-function knowledge of what actually went (is going) on?  In the
order of knowledge there is never QUITE  a transitiion from potency to
act. Not a very surprising conclusion I guess.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

	--T. S. Eliot

	 P.


On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, jporter wrote:

> 
>                                                                 {snip}
> 
> 
> >Now, does Pynchon agree with Wicks who agrees with Aristotle?
> >
> >Terrance
> 
> 
> Reality might be Gwenhiding, as Ari himself suggested, somewhere in between...
> 
> Here's some Aristotle through the lens of Heisenberg:
> 
> 
> "This concept of the probability wave was something entirely new in
> theoretical physics since Newton. Probability in mathematics or in
> statistical mechanics means a statement about our degree of knowledge of
> the actual situation. In throwing dice we do not know the fine details of
> the motion of our hands which determine the fall of the dice and therefore
> we say that the probability for throwing a special number is just one in
> six. The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater, however, meant more
> than that; it meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version
> of the old concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced
> something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the
> actual event, a~~ strange kind of physical reality just in the middle
> between possibility and reality."
> 
> Caught between a shadow and its doubt, once again. What 's a po' boy ta do?
> 
> Get real, like Venus on the Sun...
> 
> jody
> 
>