The Ceremony of Innocence: Science and Ethics

Abstract

Although the world-view of classical physics allowed the physicist to presume that communion with the essences of physical reality via mathematical laws and associated theories was possible, it otherwise made no provisions for the knowing mind. Nature in classical physics was viewed as forces acting between mass points in the abstract background of space and time. Thus the universe became a vast machine in which collections of mass points interacted with one another in terms of external forces dependent only upon the masses and the effective dynamics between them. In this model the knowing self was separate, discrete, atomized, and achieved its knowledge of physical reality from the “outside” of physical systems, without disturbing the system under study.

We do not know whether we shall succeed in once more expressing the spiritual form of our future communities in the old religious language. A rationalistic play with words and concepts is of little assistance here; the most important preconditions are honesty and directness. But since ethics is the basis for the communal life of men, and ethics can only be derived from that fundamental human attitude which I have called the spiritual pattern of the community, we must bend all our efforts to reuniting ourselves, along with the younger generation, in a common human outlook. I am convinced that we can succeed in this if again we can find the right balance between the two kinds of truth.¹

—Werner Heisenberg