¶ Middle
Index Entry
Middle:
"Comprehensively, geometrically, outwardly and inwardly, macrocosmically and microcosmically, I find that man is really in the middle. He’s in the middle between a macrocosm and microcosm geometrically. Now to be in the middle-- you really can’t improve on the middle. So when they begin to talk about improving man, I realize they can’t improve on the middle. They could get us to be just a little bit more what we’re designed to be, which means that what you do is to reduce the imperfections, the inaccuracy of the observation.
“And that’s exactly what Heisenberg discovered: the act of measuring alters that which is measured. So we will never be able to be completely exact. But the mechanic has what he calls a tolerance-- a tolerance for error. As we reduce the tolerance for error, we begin to get near the eternal, which is what we’ll call the truth. But we’ll never quite get there… man being pretty much in the middle, as is the truth itself in a kind of twilight zone on either side of the truth-- both microcosm and macrocosm, kind of closing in on it. No chemist is going to improve that situation.”
