There is a joke that goes like this:
A traffic cop pulls over Werner Heisenberg. He walks up to Heisenberg and asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?”
“No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”
Now, this joke is just wrong. Maybe it orginated correctly, and I've just heard it repeated incorrectly. But the correct answer to the question presented in the joke is "No, but I can tell you exactly where I was". The tense used being operative.
The Uncertainty Principle says that you cannot know both the location and speed of a particle, as the act of observing it will change the other variable. Now, you CAN determine how fast the particle is moving, and then locate it at some other point in time. So in this joke, Werner could very well have known both how fast he was going AND where he is. Nothing precludes that from being the case. But if the tense is consistant (how fast WERE you going..where I WAS) then the joke is a joke, and not simply nonsense.
Posted by danisaacs at June 28, 2004 02:28 PM | TrackBack