W. Heisenberg, “Physics and philosophy”- Review
Hello Physics&Philosophy Freaks! this is the first post of my old friend Max, bio-engineer with a passion for Physics and “itself” an advanced positronic brain. But he missed the proper name of HeiseNberg, probably due to the U.P. … [Ok ok, I've corrected the spelling, NdMax]
..btw, if you don’t know Heisenberg&Co, either you commit directly suicide or you just do it after watching “Electrons Are Weird“ ..[ anyway this nice vid from BBC is also recommended to all of you]
c h e .. r s! 
AZ
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W. Heisenberg, “Physics and philosophy” (Der Teil und das Ganze,1954)
The author of this book doesn’t even need a presentation. The style is definitely very smooth and accessible, and fancy maths is removed altogether.
The purpose of the whole essay (written in 1954) was to give a summary about how the evolution of physics, throughout the centuries, was able to revolutionise the very idea of reality, and how the early cartesian “Weltanschaung” heavily influenced the successive development of natural sciences and of the scientific method itself.
The first chapters are a fast-paced summary of 2500 years of epistemology (philosophy of knowledge), from the ancient Greek to the present (well, at least the present as it was in the ’50s).
In the following, Heisenberg takes the reader by the hand and introduces him/her to the most counter-intuitive aspects of quantum physics. He then explains how and why such results required, in order to be interpreted, a radical philosophical revolution within the scientific community, a revolution that, at the time when the book was written, was still at the center of white-hot debate.
Einstein is regarded as the man who first introduced a radical Ockham’s razor-like approach to physics, that first produced the Special Relativity by removing the (physically unnecessary) dogmatic belief in the absoluteness of time and space.
However, according to Heisenberg (and we educated 21st-century people can respectfully agree), Einstein himself was not able to take his approach to the extreme and shocking consequence, namely the necessity of removing the principle of deterministic causality in order to interpret some of the observed physical phenomena (an operation that led to the birth of quantum physics).
All his life he remained skeptical about the metaphysical implications of the new theory.
And here comes the most interesting thesis proposed by the book:
Heisemberg tracks the difficulty of this paradigm shift, back to the “original sin” committed by Cartesius, when he divided reality into “res cogitans” (human mind) and “res extensa” (all the rest), and assuming that the laws of physics would apply only to the second (at the time the distinction appeared necessary in order to cope with the problem of free will).
This -in itself, illegitimate- assumption would have then propagated through the centuries, producing a widely accepted view of the physical world that was lacking a solid justification both on physical and phylosophical ground.
Of great interest is also Heisenberg’s insight in the foundations of the experimental method, where a suggestive (and quantistically corrected) version of Immanuel Kant’s “a priori” is proposed.
A highly recommended reading.
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