(Our subjective conviction that the Earth and Homo sapiens are at the centre - a cherished notion, shattered by Galileo and Darwin - has been given rational and scientific backing by the paradoxical discoveries of Quantum Physics, superseding the highly ordered, mechanistic Newtonian paradigm. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot accurately determine the position and velocity simultaneously of a sub-atomic particle because of the ambiguous wave-particle nature of matter. This indeterminacy - a probability value called a ‘wave-function’ - collapses when a human observer intervenes. Quantum possibility becomes actuality because a scientist has either decided to measure something (J.A. Wheeler’s ‘Austin Interpretation’) or has become aware of it (J. Von Neumann’s ‘Princeton Hypothesis’). Here is a realm, in which objects have no innate attributes and only consciousness is real! In addition, Von Neumann denied the possibility of Artificial Intelligence because the human brain’s unique structure and substance could not be replicated. Brandon Carter proposed the idea that the advent of intelligent, carbon-based life-forms like ourselves was predestined by the design of the universe, whose vast size, far from reducing man to insignificance, confirms our place in it, since it correlates with the enormous time-scales needed for stellar dust to evolve the heavier elements that make up our bodies. Finally, James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis made Homo and all other species an indivisible part of a self-regulating, biospheric organism. Thus the interplay between man and nature, subjective and objective experience, which romantic poets, artists and mystics had long regarded as indivisible, having been severed by Descartes and Galileo, is restored - in the mind of the microscopist, who feels an imaginative empathy with his subject.
When Microbes Wink
‘The conclusions of natural science are true and necessary, and the judgment of man has nothing to do with them.’ Galileo Galilei
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ Werner Heisenberg
At Plynlimon, Wye’s source, wet hillsides pee
Together in a flush bog - not a WC
But an M6c (rush-crowned Sphagnum recurvum).
There, in a flooded, plumbed enclosure
Footsteps squelch on microbes, to observe ‘em.
To lead the invisible flock with their crozier¹