Heisenberg and Me

Whilst sitting at home in Sheffield, recuperating from a rathern nasty bilateral nasal infection (not to be confused with a mere man cold) I have decided to tackle the knotty issue of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and its relationship to life in general and blogging in particular.

Werner Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist, born in Germany in 1901, the year Barrow AFC was founded, no coincidence surely. The Uncertainty Principle for which he is best known states that, when attempting to measure the properties of a sub-atomic particle, it is impossible to know all of them accurately at the same time. So if you manage to measure the mass of the particle, you cannot simultaneously accurately know its momentum. To put it another way, at that level the clumsy macroscopic act of measuring, itself affects what is being measured (aka the Observer Effect).

So how does this apply to the humble blog? When I decided to write a blog, I didn't know anything about blogging, and so decided on two basic principles: a) write about one topic at a time (ok, so sometimes I write about two which are in some way connected); and b) don't write in detail about anyone who is likely to read the blog. The question is, are the "properties" of the blog affected, either consciously or sub-consciously, by the readership, the "measurers"? The answer is a resounding yes on both levels.

There are people who I know read the blog, people who I know who I suspect read the blog, and people who I don't know who I know read the blog. Its the old "known, unknowns, unknown knowns" thing (courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld). I write to try to entertain everyone who I think might read it, which is interesting in itself, because when I started I didn't have any concept of entertaining anyone, just writing whatever came into my head, so that is the first sub-conscious way in which the blog has been affected by the "measurers".

People often give me feedback, and I either think "That's good, I'll write some more of what they like, or "Hmm, maybe I'll steer clear of that in future." That's the conscious side of it.

And I'm often asked whether anyone who appears in the blog knows about it. The answer is as far as I know "No", and if they did, I couldn't write it as I do. I don't feel guilty about anything I've written, but I know it would be different, or more probably I would stop writing it, if the characters I'm writing about were to know about it. Thinking about it, this situation would not only affect the blog, but would almost certainly also affect the behaviour of the people concerned - towards me at least! A kind of reverse Uncertainty Principle. Of course it is possible that they do already know about it, and are acting out some sort of play which I am reporting on, and the real joke is on me. This brings us onto the nature of reality, which I'm not going to go into at this point, although I am tempted to throw in Schrodinger's Cat for good measure.

It must have been difficult being a theoretical physicist in the early years of the 20th century, and I imagine Heisenberg was made only too aware of the difficulties of measuring the useful properties of an object (namely himself) when tackled by his wife:
"What are you doing today?" I imagine her demanding of him, arms folded.
"Erm... thinking about tiny little particles that nobody knows if they exist or not, and if they do, whether you can actually know very much about them anyway, dear."
"Well, that's not getting the bloody ironing done, is it?"

Heisenberg died in 1976, at home, suffocated when a large pile of slightly damp laundry fell on top of him.