The Anthropic Principle & Its Uncertainty
or A Copenhagen Misinterpretation

      Professor Selbstmitter stood upon the lecture room stage as godlike as he knew himself to be.
      "Behold, my Uncertainty Machine!" The curtain behind him withdrew, exposing a bulky apparatus. "With this, we can test the Principle of Complementarity, which asserts that Man may know the position, or the momentum, of a particle but not both."
      A spotlight revealed a gorilla, sitting at a bank of buttons and dials. "This is Lilith. She will be checking our results." Lilith took up a Harlequin Romance and found her place.
      "Behold another assistant, Salome." Another spotlight, another station, a blue-point Siamese calmly licking itself.
      "We have also trained and invited this rat, Catherine The Great." A spotlight, a cage with a small keyboard inside, an exercise wheel and evil red eyes.
      "And finally, live from Sea World, we have Pandora the Porpoise!" A large TV monitor showed a remote shot of the aquatic mammal, playing quietly next to its own bank of dials and buttons.
      "As you know, certain physicists have proposed what they call the Weak or, as I prefer to call it, the Pusillanimous Anthropic Principle. This purports that the Universe is as we see it, because it took until now for Man to arise and perceive. In other words, the Universe is about the right age for somebody like us to come along and look around." He shook his professorial gray head. "This is unworthy of the name 'Principle'."
      In the background, Lilith turned the page.
      "Some tentative thinkers—your Einsteins, your Bohrs and Heisenbergs—pushed along slightly and contemplated, but did not have the courage to accept, what is known as the Strong Anthropic Principle. I call it the Slightly Less Pusillanimous Anthropic Principle. This claims that the Universe is as we see it only because if it were any different Man would not have arisen to perceive it." He shook his head, sadly, and stroked his neatly trimmed professorial beard. "Such a proposal lacks moral courage."
      The rat began running in its wheel. The cat covertly noticed this.
      "Today we will demonstrate both a principle of physics and a principle of philosophy. I put to you the Authoritative Anthropic Principle: that the Universe is as we see it because, Mankind having arisen, it must conform to our view."
      He grandly gestured toward the Machine. "This machine will take a particle and attempt to measure its position and momentum, and, as we know, it will find only one or the other. Through the dynamics of quantum mechanics, the process of observation will create part of a mechanical state where there was none before. These animals will show that the machine made by Man will give to them the same perception. Not only does the perception of Man define the Universe for Man, but for other minds than our own; in fact, for the entire Universe itself!"
      He strode to a workstation. "Let us begin!"
      He pushed a button. The machine whined. The animals reacted, punched or prodded their keyboards, and were rewarded with food. Except for Salome who looked bored, and studiously ignored the frantic gestures of her grad-student trainer.
      A bank of TV monitors let the audience see the dials at each workstation, and the readings the animals copied down. Professor Selbstmitter's dials showed the position of the proton in question. The animals, except for Salome, had punched in the same information. Selbstmitter's momentum dials registered nothing. But surprisingly the animals, except Salome, all had values punched in. And those values were the same for each animal.
      "Hmmm," said the Professor, clearly perplexed. "Let's try again with an electron."
      The machine whined. Salome licked her toes. Selbstmitter and the audience perceived only momentum. The animals perceived both momentum and position.
      Trying a photon, the humans saw one value, the animals two.
      "What does this tell us?" the Professor asked his audience, with somewhat less assurance than was his wont. Behind him, Lilith returned to her romance, after longingly admiring the cover illustration. Salome's trainer was taking pills, one after the other, from various bottles in her purse.
      One student raised a hand. "Perhaps the animals invent fictitious numbers in a uniform way as an artifact of the training process?"
      "Perhaps," mused the Professor. "Perhaps."
      Another student spoke. "I would assume that the experiment proves the primacy of humans in the Universe. Where lesser minds merely see mechanical states, fixed in both position and momentum, the kind of universe that is just a machine, humans introduce uncertainty, and therefore change the Universe. We have brought free will and richer complexity into the world."
      "Much better!" exclaimed Professor Selbstmitter. "And why is the Universe like this? Mechanical and fixed for the animals, yet mysterious and dynamic to us? Because Man, the Measure Of All Things, sees that it is so!!"

The Anthropic Principle & Its Uncertaintyor A Copenhagen Misinterpretation

The Anthropic Principle & Its Uncertainty
or A Copenhagen Misinterpretation