take place through the glass darkly, and our expressions in a haze of habitual approximation. Perhaps the greatest philosophical advance in physics since the advent of relativity has been the incorporation, into quantum mechanics, of the interaction of observer with observed. From the quantum-mechanical perspective, we are no longer simply with the world, but of it as well. We are participant-observers (see Figure 1).18 This theory transforms the "through a glass darkly" quality that so frustrated Beckett from a hindrance into an integral feature of perception. It turns a limitation of theory into an axiom of theory (one of the principal ways, intriguingly, that theories tend to
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FIGURE 1: "Existence viewed as a self-synthesizing system. The universe starts small (thin U at upper right), grows (loop of U), and in time gives rise (upper left) to observer-participancy—which in turn de-termines all we have the right to say about even the earliest days of the universe." (From Zurek et al., 1988, p. 614.) |
