Sunday, January 04, 2004

Charles Dickens and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal
========================================

Not to beat a dead horse, but there are some more interesting ideas in relating current Quantum their to Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". The most stimulating one is that it seems that Dickens can be seen to anticipate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal way back in 1867 in his treatment of time in "A Christmas Carol".

Put simply, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal (HUP) states that at a quantum level one cannot measure both the position and the momentum of a particle since the mere fact that you are measuring these items will effect the particle. In essence, the principal means that the simple act of trying to measure the characteristics of something will change that thing and lead to uncertainty.

Charles Dickens is very shrewd in his approach to time travel in that when Scrooge goes back in time and sees himself as a child and a young man, the Ghost of Christmas Past tells him that these things are simply shadows of the past. Dickens knows that time pollution (changing time lines due to traveling back in time and effecting the past) is an issue here. He skirts it by using a limitation of the Ghost's power to keep Scrooge from effecting the past. Clearly, this is not an example of Dickens and the HUP, but it is an interesting choice of the author.

What is an example of Dickens and the HUP is that Scrooge is never really allowed to precisely measure his life. He is given no answers by the Ghost of Christmas future, even at the end of his last journey when he asks the Ghost of Christmas Past if the images he saw of his life are simply shadows of what could happen or what will happen.

And now that Scrooge has had a chance to measure the current position his life and his life's momentum toward the future, he has in effect changed it. Not only has he changed his perception of his life, he then starts to effect change in his life to make himself a better person, a friend to the poor and a reveler of the Christmas Spirit.

If you look at his life as a one timeline, past, present and future the effect of his measuring his life at one point changes his life's momentum and then follows a change in his life's position. The net effect of the process that Scrooge unwillingly engages, using the power of the three Christmas Ghosts, whereby he measures the position (as a miserable miser) and momentum (towards a lonely death) of his life, he then changes his life (to be a generous, happy person).

Truly, Dickens can be seen to be thinking far ahead of Werner Heisenberg who came up with his Uncertainty Principal during his work on quantum mechanics in 1927. Or perhaps I am simply reading too much into it. Anyway, it's an interesting thought.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home