¶ Heisenberg: Eliot-Pound Sequence
← Heisenberg-Eliot-Pound Sequence | Heisenberg-Eliot-Pound Sequence →
Index Entry
Heisenberg: Eliot-Pound Sequence:
“Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, identified as ‘indeterminism’ the experimentally disclosed fact that the act of measuring-- bringing light to bear on the observed phenomenon-- automatically excited the specimen’s atoms and in one way or another altered the observed phenomenon in such a way that it was not exactly the same phenomenon as before the measuring commenced. Before Heisenberg’s ‘indeterminism,’ T.S. Eliot said 'the act of considering history alters history. Ezra Pound anticipated them both when he remarked much earlier that ‘the act of thinking alters thought.’ Thus evolution must forever alter the total inventory of humanity’s nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experience for clearly experience always alters previous experience and the process is both irreversible and non-identically repetitive.”
