The Measures We’ve Taken, 3: Into The Permanent Beta

Perpetual change and no objectivity? Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man.

When I taught at Berkeley, I’d start my last class with a riddle: What is the one thing that the Internet is never, ever, allowed to do? What’s the thing that would be utterly unacceptable?

The answer was “be exactly the same as the last time you looked.” Just imagine: you get on line, and every email, every social media page, every message, image, video, whatever, is exactly the same as when you left, no matter where you looked. 

Nobody ever guessed the answer, and a lot of people seemed stressed at the thought that this could happen. In its own way, this says much about the progression from precise and standardized measurement to a world of personal truths and perpetual change. 

The Industrial Era didn’t seem headed this way. In 1899 Max Planck seemingly brought the world-changing advent of standardized measurement to its logical end. From relationships between meters, light, gravity, and other constants he derived something called a Planck length, which is about 1.6 x 10^-35 meters. It’s so tiny, about 10⁻²⁰ the size of a proton, that you can’t judge a distance between any two things at less than that.

The head of a pin, 10x magnification, by by Hugo Sappington. Public domain. Even if angels take up no space, presumably no more than 1.6 x 10³⁵ can dance on this. Question resolved!

Presumably every system of measurement in the universe must ultimately reduce no further than that if it’s to stay precise.

Game over, in favor of massive stability, right? Oops. Einstein, Bohr and others went on to develop the new physics. For measurement, nothing captures this change like Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which shows that you can’t measure both position and momentum with exact precision at the same time. 

The death of exactitude may not seem to affect our day to day lives, but the new physics proved that our quotidian world is just one aspect of reality. Its statistically intense view of how things work meant that we live in a world of probability rather than certainty.