Heisenberg is coming to Passover

Passover is upon us once again. This year, Heisenberg is coming to Passover and he has changed my thinking on the Jewish holiday.

In years past, I thought that the Passover Seder, the ritual meal, was mystical. The Seder is comprised of fourteen mini-rituals which, if assembled well, comprise a mystical experience.

The mini-rituals of the Passover Seder include matzo, the famous four questions, four glasses of wine and the telling of the Exodus story - best remembered by the movie starring Charlton Heston as Moses. Heston, by the way, died yesterday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84.

The word Seder in Hebrew means order. The mini-rituals come in a particular order: Number 1, bless the wine. Number 2, ritual washing of the hands. Number 3, dip the parsley in salt water. Etc. The word Seder also means order in the sense of making order from chaos.

After all, doesn't the very idea of "ritual" suggest some sort of order imposed?

If your family is like mine, order from chaos is a Herculean task (oops, did I just make a reference to something Greek?) If your family is anything like mine, there are children squirming in their seats; Uncle Bob always gets impatient to get on with it (when is it time to eat?); the last glass of wine never gets finished because peoples' attentions wane after all the eating and drinking; and by the way, "who has the Afikomen? - Can't finish the Seder without it."

Pursuing the mystical satisfaction of that perfect Seder requires zealous devotion - a fiery passion best given to younger people than I. When my daughter was born, that mystical pursuit was subordinated to thinking about how I would teach her - of not forgetting that kids being kids necessarily brings us back to the world from ritual meditation.

Heisenberg? Oh yea. Almost forgot. Enter Heisenberg. The traditional heroes of the Passover story are Moses, his brother Aaron, sister Miriam and the prophet Elijah- for whom we open our doors and pour a fifth glass of wine.

This year, I would like to also pour a glass for Werner Heisenberg. He wasn't, by the way, a Jew. He did win a Nobel Prize for physics in 1932 for his work in quantum physics. In 1926 he published a paper which introduced his Uncertainty Principle.

The Uncertainty Principle states, very simply, that the act of observation (of an electron for example) might change the behavior of that which is being observed. In other words, because of the interplay between the light needed to see an electron and the electron itself, the course of the electron might change. Heisenberg concluded that the location, speed and direction of an electron at any point can be described accurately by a matrix of possibilities rather than a single certainty. Hence, electrons orbit in "clouds". Hence, the Uncertainty Principle.

Heisenberg's theory wrecked empirical science - even if he did clarify the confusion of parents (just exchange the word "children" for "electron" in that last paragraph and it will make sense). Heisenberg, after all, had seven of them (kids, not electrons).

That is, despite all of our intent to impose order on the universe by describing it through experiment and observation, there are mysteries we still must fudge. That sometimes we simply cannot make order out of that which we observe.

I might add that my friend Charles Darwin was likely trying to impose order on his observations about the immense diversity of life when he developed his theories of evolution.

Anyway, the pursuit of the perfect Seder - imposing perfect order on the universe is at best, uncertain.

I don't mean to diminish the majesty of Passover or the meticulousness of Darwin's thinking when I say that I find it comforting that despite our best efforts, there is only so much we can do to impose order on our world. Heisenberg gave us scientific permission to be awed by the mysteries in our universe, despite our best efforts to solve them. We must still try to solve them. That is our nature. And they must still continue to elude us. That is just nature.

Happy Passover.