Leibniz and Newton were engaged in the ontological question of `what is the seat of reality' embodied by the difference between realism and idealism. Let us not be distracted too much by referring to Leibniz and Newton when discussing quantum mechanics. On the other hand I rather suspect that people like Maxwell and JJ Thompson would have been aware of these issues, even if they had no particular need to worry about them. So in my view Heisenberg was simply pointing out a limit of token dynamic relations that Leibniz had told us about but which most people had ignored because they could get away with it. To my understanding, however, the need to face up to this problem is understood by Leibniz, which is why he proposes a 'strange' system of dynamic units that are not entirely deterministic, have no size or shape, and otherwise match up pretty well with modes of excitation in quantum field theory.
#HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE HOW TO#
The problem of how to share out dynamics symmetrically and continuously without being allowed the infinitesimal has to be faced up to. The comfortable idea of Democritan atoms finally has to be binned. It seems new because it is in a context of a new theory that for the first time in technical terms addresses the paradoxes raised by having a set of dynamic rules based on continuous variables that in our universe is expressed by discrete dynamic units. There is nothing very new about what he says. In relation to Heisenberg, my understanding is that his principle indicates a simple property of complex waves, as indicated above. As indicated by others Heisenberg is about what there is to know, not what we 'cannot know'. Is Eddington conflating different problems here? I suspect Eddington is right to suggest that our understanding of knowing could do with some tidying up but I am not sure it is so much about what is knowable and what is not knowable but rather about what we mean by knowing and what there is to know. You cannot see an elephant without seeing the electrons that send us the photons. But in another sense all we see is electrons. Maybe this is linked to the common practice of calling electrons 'unknowables' at that time in philosophy on the basis that we think we cannot see electrons. There seems some confusion about 'the knowable' which he relates to macroscopic physics in the quote. However, I suspect he did not get very far and certainly not as far as the enlightenment figures like Berkeley, who took things much further (maybe too far).
![heisenberg principle heisenberg principle](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TQKELOE9eY4/maxresdefault.jpg)
Eddington is well known for criticising the naïve realist position behind 'classical schoolroom physics' and making some headway into a more subtle ontology. You can demonstrate that infinities are for real - and that they can never be apprehended fully. the suite of aleph numbers, and many more besides. There is demonstrably a infinity of infinities (if you forgive me, for the time being, for this demonstrably inherently imprecise statement, which in turn you could only further improved by saying 'an infinity of infinities of infinities, etc.) - e.g. Interestingly, the second example that springs to mind would be infinities. Stripped of its bells and whistles, what it means is that no system can ever be known from within that system: to fully apprehend something, you have to position yourself outside that something (be it mathematics, or the Universe itself, etc.) This gives rise to never-ending recurrence relationships at every step of your attempting to acquire knowledge, which becomes a "receding mirage". Two examples ? One is Gödel's incompleteness.
![heisenberg principle heisenberg principle](https://scientips.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/uncertainty-relation.jpg)
![heisenberg principle heisenberg principle](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pOY9PNlxIvk/maxresdefault.jpg)
There are however things that could be construed as impeding knowledge *in principle* and therefore have relevance to epistemology.