I started this post several days ago. I'm finally getting around to posting it.
For some inexplicable reason, I woke up this morning thinking about Heisenberg. Werner Heisenburg was a German physicist in the early 20th century. He helped invent (or discover) Quantum Mechanics, which is something that makes you sound really smart when you bring it up in casual conversation at a party, but in reality, you and I and just about everyone else on the planet really haven't got the slightest clue about what we're talking about. Heisenberg was a pretty smart guy, but he worked for the 3rd Reich, and luckily, he wasn't as smart as Einstein or Bohr or some of the other brainiacs we had on our side, or WWII might have ended differently, in which case we'd all be speaking German instead of English today. We'd have probably even ended up with a bunch of politicians and activists promoting socialized medicine. And it might have even meant that we'd also have a bunch radicals running around sounding the alarm about global climate change or crusading against fatty foods, like the Nazis did. Sure glad that nothing like that is happening. But I digress.
Anyway, Heisenberg was supposedly fairly smart, and as part of the quantum physics thingy he helped to invent, he came up with something now known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We'll call it the HUP so we can save time and keyboard strokes, and sound like we hang out with brilliant people and talk about quantum physics stuff all the time. The general idea of the HUP is that some pairs of properties are linked in such as way they cannot both be measured precisely at the same time. The more you know about one, then the less you know about the other.
For example, the more you fill your brain with American Idol, the less you know about anything that's actually useful.
If I were a brilliant physicist, I would, in hushed tones, say that the HUP tells us we can't simultaneously know both the position and direction of a mass of particles. We can, for example, know with precision, the direction of the mass, but any individual particle is free to move about at will, and it's impossible to know or predict its location, or where it will end up over time. Or something like that.
You may possibly be asking what any of this has to do with Mormon? That's a brilliant question. As far as I know, Mormon wasn't a quantum physicist. He didn't even have a last name. But he understood the spiritual and social implications of the HUP way before Heisenberg was a twinkle in his daddy's eye. At some point in the decline of Nephite society, Mormon and Moroni knew perfectly well that their society was going to be destroyed, because they had ripened in wickedness, and there was an everlasting decree on the land that ensured that any nation possessing the land would be swept off of it when they were "ripe in iniquity." So they knew that the "mass" of society was toast because they didn't and wouldn't repent. But they didn't know whether any one individual would repent and turn away from their wickedness. Each person had their free will, and could change direction at any time, in spite of the direction of the mass.
So Mormon and Moroni had a work to do, and they continued their efforts to bring souls to Christ, to the very end. They didn't give up hope that even if their labors among the Nephites were in vain, they would meet many souls in the kingdom of God; souls who would repent and come unto Christ because of what they and other prophets had written in the Book of Mormon. Each of us are free to choose whether we'll follow the mass of society off the cliff that they're racing toward today, or to turn toward the Savior and follow Him.
Love, Dad
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