Carver Mead not quite believing in Unschärfe

Carver Mead, eminent physicist of VLSI- and analog-digital fame, does not quite believe in the commonly accepted uncertainty principle or at least he does not take for granted some of the heuristics derived off of Heisenberg's very important theorem.

It may have gone under in my Brian Brain comment last week but that link, the story behind it and comment deserve better, because they're funny, radical and understandable even for the layman:

Mead makes some pretty interesting points about the sorry state of obscurantism that typifies our current interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Replace quantum mechanics with unsichtbare Weltanschauungsgrundlagen and you will recognize that Carver Mead and some other hard scientists, some of which get mentioned in the interview, are pretty radical guys. The times, they keep on changing. For the goode, mostly.

Brian "Laputan" Foote, by way of name coincidence has redetected a real gem here:

An Interview the American Spectator did with Carver Mead in 2002. American Spectator quite obviously does not offer the interview online anymore and is to busy to serve any content quite often anyway, so it looks like the reconstructed by Wayne Stewart version, done for Laputan Logic and linked above is the place to go.

Even if you do not quite accept all the propositions of Mr. Mead they can serve as a very fine point of entry to rethink one or the other weltbild-dogma introduced in the last century.

(In the meantime we have also found a backup on freespace.virgin.net.)

Here's an interview Technology Review died with Mr. Mead, more focused on the world computing technolgies.

TR: Is it the inherent difficulty of adapting digital technologies to our mostly analog human world? MEAD: Digital abstraction is a wonderful thing. It substitutes a very simple set of logic operations and, or, and not for an infinite set of physical things. Working in analog is much harder, because there are essentially countless ways for the thing to go wrong. You're working with the physics itself, rather than with some very small set of circuits that have been crafted to show digital behavior.

We really really do recommend reading both interviews. Many things get put into a slightly more real perspective than common by this Old Man Mead (born in '34). Straight stuff, straight story.

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