Even the short reign of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle had not changed the fundamental orientation towards Order and Cosmos; the Heisenbcrg uncertainty was one they were certain of! It could be formulated, expressed, and a rigorous statistical mechanics could be built from it. In 1958 Horowitz’s reformulation of wave mechanics had eliminated the concept. Order and causation were restored. But this damned business! One might as well pray for rain, wish on the Moon, go to faith healers, surrender whole hog to Bishop Berkeley’s sweetly cereb-al world-in-your-head. ‘-the tree’s not a tree, when there’s no one about on the quad!
Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; he was in no danger of becoming mentally unbalanced through a failure of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient for things to work the way one expected them to. On order and natural law was based predictability; without predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, not poison; deKalb receptors should work, work the way they were designed to; Chaos was insupportable – it could not be lived with
Suppose Chaos were king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos – by Mind! The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then
More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them
Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty – and thereby let magic loose in the world
He was beginning, he thought, to understand what had happened to magic. Magic was the erratic law of an animistic world; it had been steadily pushed back by the advancing philosophy of invariant causation. It was gone now – until this new outbreak – and its world with it, except for backwaters of ‘superstition’. Naturally an experimental scientist reported failure when investigating haunted houses, apportations, and the like; his convictions prevented the phenomena from happening
The deep jungles of Africa might be very different places -when there was no white man around to see! The strangely slippery laws of magic might still obtain
Perhaps these speculations were too extreme; nevertheless, they had one advantage which orthodox concepts had not: they included Gramps Schncider’s hexing of the deKalbs. Any working hypothesis which failed to account for Schneider’s -and his own – ability to think a set of deKalbs into operation was not worth a continental. This one did, and it conformed to Gramps’s own statements: ‘All matters are doubtful’ and ‘A thing can both be, not be, and he anything. There are many true ways of looking at the same thing. Some ways are good, some are bad.
Very well. Accept it. Act on it. The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability! He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the cosmos! It had been a good start to assure Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs were foolproof. Good. So let it be. They were foolproof. They would never get out of order