Chapter 18
ANARCHY AT LAST
I
f Bohr’s numinous principle of complementarity failed to conquer physics and made hardly a ripple outside the confines of science, Heisenberg’s paradoxically precise uncertainty principle has ascended to a remarkable level of intellectual celebrity. In the chaos following the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, one ingenious editorialist invoked Heisenberg by way of explaining why reporters were getting the big story wrong. Journalists embedded with the troops, he said, naturally took note of all the problems around them—a brokendown tank, food and fuel shortages, antagonism with the locals, miscommunication within the military—and deduced from these immediate difficulties that the operation as a whole was foundering. But a version of the uncertainty principle, this commentator said, dictates that “the more precisely the media mea-
