What does "is" mean? It means "is"

(With apologies to any devotees of General Semantics who may read this.) A correspondent sends a pointer to this Spiked article. Another sees him and raises with this NRO article. The first is a description of the unholy (and probably unconscious; both sides would likely be horrified if they realized who their allies were) alliance between the religious right and the academic left in support of creationism. (When pundits speak of "the religious right", of course, they always mean "the Christian right"; as West is British, however, and other religions, as much as they actually exist in the U.K., do not show up much on the radar screen there, I shall grant him absolution). The second is Dave Kopel’s take on Heisenberg and postmodernism. Both West and Kopel apparently assign the root cause, or at least the root excuse, for postmodernism (by which they mean reactionary fascism with a Marxist face) to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Thus, Kopel writes: What does all this have to do with Werner Heisenberg? The answer is that Heisenberg provided what was seen as the scientific foundation for postmodernism. whilst West writes: For a generation now, the academic left has been engaged in a war against science as we know it: propagating the notion that science is an inherently Western concept, that it is culturally perspectival, but most of all, after Werner Heisenberg, that it is an imperfect and thoroughly flawed 'discourse'. and even goes on to say: In addition [to the Uncertainty Principle] was Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which - it seemed - suggested that how one saw the cosmos depended upon the point from which one was looking. Of course – aside from the irony of basing a fundamentally anti-scientific pseudo-philosophy as postmodernism on scientific ideas – the academic left stands in total ignorance of both Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s meaning. This is not surprising, since an understanding of either general relativity or quantum mechanics requires mathematics, a discipline which is repugnant to both academics and leftists as requiring thought. Einstein’s principle of relativity was after all, based on the notion that there was no privileged frame of reference – that the fundamental laws of physics were the same no matter where you were. (Purists will correctly note that this refers to unaccelerated frames). This is, of course, the complete opposite of postmodernism, which falsely insists that the appearance of the universe depends not only on one’s point of vantage, but on one’s point of view. What Einstein in fact says, in contradiction to postmodernism, is, "The universe not only is the same, but looks the same, whether you’re a DWEM, a feminist, a Palestinian apologist, or even Noam Chomsky". As for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it is not the vague-sounding "The observer somehow affects the process" that poseurs and academics like to intone. It is, if the apparent oxymoron may be overlooked, an exact uncertainty: Dx * Dp > h Dt * DE > h (If a capital "d" shows up your browser, it should be interpreted as a delta; i.e., a change) The "h", of course, is Planck’s constant, which is an exact value: 6.62606891x10-34 Jsec. To any unreconstructed postmodernists reading this, that is a very small number. Is it possible that all the air molecules in my study will suddenly relocate to the other side of the room, leaving me to strangle in vacuum? Sure. Am I holding my breath (literally or figuratively) waiting for it to happen? No: it won’t happen my lifetime, nor the universe’s, nor in as many universes as my lifespan could fit in to this one. A "true" postmodernism based on Einstein and Heisenberg would take, as its principles: No matter where you’re coming from, things are the same Any uncertainty in saying this is too small to make any difference You’ll never be in a place where these statements are not true Deal with it John "Akatsukami" Braue Monday, April 08, 2002

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