indeterminacyn.

1649 E. Reynolds Israels Prayer (new ed.) vi. 72 Such an indifferency and indeterminacy in the manner of working.

1879 W. Thomson & P. G. Tait Treat. Nat. Philos. (new ed.) I: Pt. i. §337 The linear transformation ceases to be wholly determinate; but the degree or degrees of indeterminacy which supervene is the reverse of embarrassing.

1892 Nation (N.Y.) 27 Oct. 324/2 Vagueness is an indeterminacy in the limits of the application of an idea.

1919 J. M. Keynes Econ. Consequences Peace v. 208 The Allies recognised the inconvenience of the indeterminacy of the burden laid upon Germany.

1947 P. A. M. Dirac Princ. Quantum Mech. (ed. 3) i. 4 There is an unavoidable indeterminacy in the calculation of observational results, the theory enabling us to calculate in general only the probability of our obtaining a particular result when we make an observation.

1953 C. F. Hockett in S. Saporta & J. R. Bastian Psycholinguistics (1961) 46/1 Thus, if there is no indeterminacy, no element of choice, there can be no transmission of information.

1962 Listener 15 Feb. 290/1 Most murderers are now subject to a higher degree of indeterminacy in their sentence than would be the case with those who were given the maximum sentence which I am canvassing.

1962 Listener 27 Sept. 472/2 Contemporary composers such as Stockhausen are often attacked for their deliberate indeterminacy—a word which has become a technical term.

1963 D. A. Firmage Fund. Theory of Struct. v. 118 To determine the degree of indeterminacy..remove reaction components one at a time and see if the structure is stable against all possible forces.

1971 Archivum Linguisticum 2 50 It will be seen that the inclusion of a single additional item serves to reduce in some measure the indeterminacy we have noted as attending the parts and the whole of words.

1928 A. S. Eddington Nature Physical World x. 220 It was Heisenberg again who set in motion the new development in the summer of 1927, and the consequences were further elucidated by Bohr. The outcome of it is a fundamental general principle which seems to rank in importance with the principle of relativity. I shall here call it the ‘principle of indeterminacy’. The gist of it can be stated as follows: a particle may have position or it may have velocity but it cannot in any exact sense have both.

1938 W. S. Maugham Summing Up 289 Of late the Principle of Indeterminacy, by bringing to view certain events to which apparently no causes can be assigned, has cast a doubt on the universal efficacy of those laws upon which science has hitherto been based.

1959 Listener 1 Oct. 519/1 Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy showed that the process of observing could affect the observation.

1964 D. Rosenthal Introd. Properties Metals iv. 68 There is the unavoidable lack of resolution caused by the interaction between waves and particles and deriving from the fundamental behavior of matter and energy (the indeterminacy principle).

1971 Physics Bull. June 329/2 It led Heisenberg to formulate his principle of indeterminacy, postulating that a measurement of one property of an entity, such as its momentum, involved an inevitable uncertainty in our knowledge of the conjugate property, such as its position.