...[Ernst] Mach became convinced that much of what you sensed about the world was in your mind, and that anything you could ever say about reality is subjective, altered by conditions like temperature, or sound, acceleration, pressure, even mood. There was nothing "out there" that you could be certain of...all a [person] could be sure of was what his own personal experiences, his "five senses," showed him...You might invent some scientific law to explain...forces, but you should always rememeber that it was you who invented the law!...and For Mach, there was no reason why the rest of the Cosmos should be doing what your little bit was doing!, so science should only "describe," not "explain."

And even description is relative...take the position of a star. It depends on where you see it from, which depends on the date and time, which depends on the position of the Earth in solar orbit, in a solar system, moving round and round at the edge of a galaxy which, itself, might be drifting away from some other galaxy, and so on, and so on...there was no point in trying to find some theoretical universal absolute. There were no absolutes you could know anything about!

...Well, the physicists were cheesed-off about the whole affair!, until, fittingly, a Swiss government bureaucrat called Einstein simply invented a new Universe! It was Mach who gave Einstein the idea...Einstein's cosmic re-write of the Laws of Nature just said that everything in the Universe is relative, and everything you observed about it depended on the frame of reference you're in at the time...You could never measure [anything] except relative to your frame of reference, and like Mach said, you could never measure [anything] outside your frame of reference, because you could never know what it was doing, relative to you!...

...Heisenberg called this drain down which everything went The Uncertainty Principle.
        "Now we know," he said, "that we shall never know." There's nothing at the fundamental level of existence that you can see "as it is," because in seeing it...shining a light on it...you do something to it. There's no true basic reality to find, beyond the one that you yourself make by looking...

Certainty...changes all the time. As for the permanent values which are supposed to remain unchanged, despite our changing knowledge, well, they change, too. Once it was good to burn women, wrong to claim the Earth went 'round the sun, logical to argue about angels on the head of a pin…

Values change every time the Universe changes, and that's every time we redefine a big enough bit of it...through the process of "discovery," that isn't discovery - just the invention of another version of how things are. And yet, in spite of that, we still go on believing that today's version of things is the only right one...We've always had to have conformity with the current view. Disagree with the Church, and you were punished as a heretic; with the Political System, as a revolutionary; with the Scientific Establishment, as a charlatan; with the Educational System, as a failure. If you didn't fit the mold, you were rejected.

But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument, a new system that...could blow everything wide open. Because with it, we could operate on the basis that values and standards and ethics and facts and truth all depend on what your view of the world is. And there may be as many views of that as there are people! And with [the microchip] - capable of keeping a tally on those millions of opinions, voiced electronically - we might be able to lift the limitations of conforming to any centralized, representational form of government...might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge...uniting them instead in an electronic community, where the Himalayas and Manhattan are only a split-second apart.

You might, with that and much more, break the mold which has held us back since the beginning, in a future world - which we would describe as balanced anarchy! - and they will describe as an open society...might be able to do away with the greatest tragedy of our era: the centuries old waste of human talent that we couldn't, or wouldn't, use.