RGE Monitor – “I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.” – John Maynard Keynes, ‘The End of Laissez-faire’.

It is sometimes useful and always amusing to look back at one’s earlier thoughts. The following piece was originally published two years ago (June 2, 2006 to be precise) – an altogether more innocent age, and from the vantage point of Autumn 2008, seemingly aeons ago. I have made no alterations (other than omissions for the sake of brevity) to the original and current, languidly ironic, commentary is added in parentheses in a jaunty orange.

At the level of the very small, making accurate statements about “reality” is fraught, and may indeed be impossible. According to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in sub-atomic physics we can know the path an electron takes, or we can know where it is at any given moment, but we cannot know both. The very act of observation disturbs location. Take Erwin Schroedinger’s hypothetical cat, sitting in a box with one radioactive atom attached to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the particle degrades within an hour, the vial will break and the cat will die. If not, the cat will live. As Bill Bryson indicates in his endearing “Short history of nearly everything” (Doubleday, 2003):

“But we could not know which was the case, so there (is) no choice, scientifically, but to regard the cat as 100% alive and 100% dead at the same time.”

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