Physics or Philosophy?

OK, don't be put off by the title. I know it's a bit of a stretch to think of physics and philosophy as ways of viewing the world. It was for me, at least, until I took physics in college.

I was one of those people who wanted to think he had a scientific mind but really didn't. Especially in physics and chemistry, my mind always wandered away from the subject. Why did I have to memorize all of those formulae? Did anyone really think this stuff would be helpful when I started actively contributing to society in a meaningful way? Who thought up all that stuff anyway? It wasn't until my physics class in college that I realized that I had been thinking about science all wrong! Science in general, and physics more particularly, could be approached in ways that the philosophers have used for centuries! That Welsh physics professor helped us to explore not only basic physics, but life in general by asking questions, experiencing and providing an environment in which to talk about the experience. Soon enough, the class realized that the formulae were not a required "law" but a gift to help give words and shape to the life experience.

Sounds weird, I know - welcome to the inside of my head! That experience reminded me of a truth that Phyllis Tickle shared with our book group recently. She quipped that Albert Einstein gave rise to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that later gave rise to philosophers like Caputo, Foucault and the 20th Century Existentialists.

I admit that the only thing I know about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is that one of two components can be determined at a time about an electron: (1) its location and (2) its momentum.  In other words, when observing the atomic world (the quantum world, even) the observer can never know for certain (thus, the "uncertainty" of the Heisenberg Principle) the momentum if s/he is observing the location; conversely, the observer cannot know the location if s/he observes the momentum. To observe one is to be uncertain of the other.

Of course, philosophers latched on to this idea and deconstructed all of life - not just atoms or electrons. It seems a clean manner of learning about life. In reality, the Uncertainty Principle makes a mess of everything! No longer can I say that "this happened because of that". Can I any longer say, "where there's smoke, there's fire"? I don't know.

Where is all this going? I don't know. No, really, I don't know and I wonder if it's OK to say, "I don't know"?