ordering of things in the sense of mathematically formulable laws. The
discovery of such laws will then always be the last step but one in
scientific investigation; the last will inevitably be the dissolution
of such laws into chaos. For a consistent scientific thinking that goes
this way, therefore, nothing is left but to recognize chaos as the only
real basis of an apparently ordered world, a chaos on whose surface the
laws that seem to hold sway are only the illusory picturings of the
human mind. This, then, is the principle of Indeterminacy as it has
been encountered in the course of practical investigation into the
electrical processes within physical matter.

In the following way Professor Schrödinger, another leading thinker among
modern theoretical physicists, explains the philosophical basis for the
principle of Indeterminacy, which scientists have established in the
meantime:1

'Every quantitative observation, every observation making use of
measurement, is by nature discontinuous. ... However far we go in the
pursuit of accuracy we shall never get anything other than a finite
series of discrete results. ... The raw material of our quantitative
cognition of nature will always have this primitive and discontinuous
character. ... It is possible that a physical system might be so simple
that this meagre information would suffice to settle its fate; in that
case nature would not be more complicated than a game of chess. To
determine a position of a game of chess thirty-three facts suffice. ...
If nature is more complicated than a game of chess, a belief to which
one tends to incline, then a physical system cannot be determined by a
finite number of observations. But in practice a finite number of
observations is all that we could make.'