A Domain Of Wonders

There is an approach to existence called determinism where, as Benjamín Labatut writes in When We Cease to Understand the World, we can think “everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state.” It was Walter Heisenberg who discovered that we actually exist in a world with a “spectrum of probabilities.”

In particular, Heisenberg discovered that particles can exist in many places at once. This is a part of what is called quantum physics and Heisenberg is most known for what is called the “Uncertainty Principle.”

Why is this important? Heisenberg’s insight offers us both the truth and the metaphor that events we experience in our lives are not always the result of consequences, but sometimes chance. This means in our universe, and perhaps in our lives, everything is both probable and possible. This means we live, as Labatut puts it, in a “domain of wonders.”

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