Quantum Language and the Migration of Scientific Concepts

Quantum Language and the Migration of Scientific Concepts

Jennifer Burwell

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burwell, Jennifer, author.

Title: Quantum language and the migration of scientific concepts / Jennifer Burwell.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028080| ISBN 9780262037556 (hardcover ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Quantum theory--Philosophy. | Physics--Philosophy. | Quantum theory in literature.

eISBN 9780262345101

Classification: LCC QC174.13 .B874 2018 | DDC 530.1201/4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028080

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Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Introduction

1 Experience, Perception, and the Limits of Language

2 The Physics of Visuality, Intuition, and Aesthetics

3 Quantum Paradigms in Literary Criticism

4 New and Post-New Age Appropriations

5 Quantum versus Nuclear Discourse

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Almost a century after its main principles were established, quantum physics remains one of the most conceptually elusive theoretical paradigms in science—so elusive that even its original architects were confounded by the results that their calculations produced. It also remains one of the most figuratively allusive paradigms, a fact that cannot be separated from the baffling nature of its principles. The tenets of quantum physics—and the strange phenomena that they describe—originate in and are expressed most precisely by highly abstract algebraic equations. The main challenge posed by quantum phenomena does not lie, however, in its mathematics; it lies instead in how these phenomena in their very nature strain the limits of comprehension and representations: electrons that behave sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves; atomic systems that exist simultaneously in all possible states—until they are observed; electrons that reveal their position only if their momentum remains a mystery; and particles that exist at great distances from one another but appear to know and respond to what each other is doing. The counterintuitive nature of quantum theory—and especially its curious relationship to everyday experience and representation in language—is the engine for a set of key questions that I address in this book. Why, for instance, did these mathematically driven concepts compel their founders to spend so much time reflecting upon ontological, epistemological, and linguistic concerns? What do quantum phenomena, considered in the context of the founders’ reflection and debates on how to describe them, reveal about the relationship between everyday experience, perception, and language? How—and why—do quantum concepts get taken up again fifty years after their formulation in cultural contexts far removed from their origins in physics? What, for example, made quantum theory appeal to advocates of Eastern mysticism starting in the 1970s, literary critics starting in the 1980s, and contemporary hawkers of distant healing and get-rich schemes starting in the 1990s? What is revealed about the agendas and priorities of these later iterations in the ways that they interpret and misinterpret the original quantum concepts? Finally, how can a comparison of the quantum discourse that emerged from these iterations and the nuclear discourse that emerged around the development and detonation of the atomic bomb illuminate both to greater advantage? As I progress through the book, working out and through these questions, I offer the reader a tale of conflict, manipulation, personal profit, and mythmaking.

In chapters 1 and 2, I focus on core concepts that Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and German physicist Werner Heisenberg developed: complementarity, indeterminacy, wave mechanics, and matrix mechanics. Each of these men made other significant contributions to the field of physics that I do not discuss in these chapters: Heisenberg made important breakthroughs in hydrodynamics and nuclear physics, Bohr was a central figure in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, and Schrödinger contributed in essential ways to the quantum principles of nonlocality and superposition—two concepts that become central in chapters 3 and 4, but are not of major significance to chapters 1 and 2. I have also chosen not to include—except in passing and in how they relate to the theories of Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg—the fundamental contributions to the quantum interpretation made by other physicists and mathematicians such as Paul Dirac, John Von Neumann, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein.

A number of factors drove my decision to focus on Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg. First, these three physicists assembled the key concepts that made quantum physics cohere as a theory—to the point where their names are virtually synonymous with the birth and evolution of quantum physics. Second, the debates that surrounded the quantum interpretation circled for the most part around these three men, with Schrödinger typically on one side, and Bohr and Heisenberg on the other. Third, Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg all reflected on the questions of visualizability, intuition, and aesthetics with respect to quantum physics—questions that compose the primary concerns of my second chapter. Finally, all three men were exceptional in their extensive engagement with quantum physics’ problematic relationship to the constellation of language, experience, and sense perception—a relationship that is central to my analysis in chapter 1, and to my analysis in chapters 3 and 4 of the later uses and abuses of quantum concepts.

Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg were unusually reflective about the relationship between language and the material world. For these three physicists, quantum physics proved to be as much a communicative experiment as it was a material one, and as much about language as it was about mathematics. This preoccupation emerged from the way in which the so-called quantum interpretation, whose logic defies our sense-based experience of the material world, poses special challenges to communication. Even to name a quantum phenomenon is already to introduce a metaphorical distortion, a kind of semantic drift that imposes conventional concepts onto utterly novel phenomena. So contentious was the question of language and representation for Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg that a bitter dispute arose between, for example, Schrödinger, who remained committed to using classical language and concepts, and Heisenberg, who frequently advocated limiting the representation of quantum behavior to the exact mathematics. Understanding why this dispute arose, and why the quantum interpretation proved so resistant to representation, requires some knowledge of the primary concepts of quantum theory that I will summarize below.

The Birth of Quantum Physics

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.

—Richard Feynman

From the time of the ancient Greeks, it was believed that all matter was composed of small, indivisible particles called atoms. This belief persisted through Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, which he introduced in his 1704 treatise Optics. Thirty-two years earlier, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens had established mathematically and experimentally an alternative interpretation—that light was wave-like in nature—but Huygens’s theory was never accepted, and Newton’s particulate atomism won the day. Only when Thomas Young performed his famous double-slit experiment in 1803, demonstrating the wave quality of subatomic matter, were the foundations of Newton’s corpuscular model shaken. Using sunlight, Young passed light through a screen with two pinholes in it and recorded the results on a detecting surface placed behind the screen. If light were particulate, one would expect to see a collection of dots the size of the holes show up on the plate. Instead, alternating lighter and darker bands appear, indicating a process of interference that could only be possible if light were wave-like. Young’s experiment eventually led to the overturning of Newton’s model, and the wave theory of light seemed to have prevailed.

Young’s wave model endured throughout the nineteenth century. Then, in 1900, Max Planck laid the foundation for quantum theory when he proved that energy could only be emitted in discrete, particle-like units, with each unit making up a quantum of energy. Plank’s breakthrough was reinforced by Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect, and in 1905 Einstein proved that light was formed of discrete, particulate quantum packets, later known as photons. If Young had proved that light is wave-like, Planck and Einstein had just as convincingly proved that it is particle-like, and the theory of light seemed to have reached an irresolvable impasse. The situation became even more complicated when, in 1924, French physicist Louis de Broglie demonstrated that not just light, but all subatomic particles behave in some respects like waves and in some respects like particles. This meant that both the wave and particle theories were right: somehow, subatomic phenomena were both waves and particles.

The dual nature of photons, electrons, neutrons, and other atomic energies challenged received notions of atomic matter as being self-consistent and unchanging; even more than this, it challenged our basic notion of an entity, which must by its nature be one thing or another. A modification of Young’s double-slit experiment, predicted mathematically in 1925 by Erwin Schrödinger, revealed an even stranger aspect of subatomic matter.¹ If both slits are open, but only one single photon is emitted, a remarkable result ensues: a wave pattern of light and dark bands appears on the photographic plate, as if this single particle has traveled through both slits simultaneously and interfered with itself. This interference only occurs, however, if no detecting instrument is introduced, and the photon is allowed to proceed unobserved toward the screen. Once a detecting instrument is introduced, the photon appears to know that it is being watched, at which point it decides to behave as a single photon ought to, producing a particle-like dot pattern. On a subatomic level, then, it appears that it is impossible to separate the act of observation from the behavior of the object, and that observation in fact constitutes the object.

The months between early 1925 and the middle of 1927 proved to be determinate for quantum physics, with the field’s foundations—Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, Max Born and Pascual Jordan’s matrix mechanics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Max Born’s theory of probability, and Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity—all emerging during that time. In 1926, Schrödinger published four successive papers that solved for a host of atomic behaviors, and included the wavefunction equation that laid out the principles of his wave mechanical interpretation. Schrödinger’s wave mechanics emphasized the deterministic, wave-like continuity of atomic systems and thus maintained a relation to classical physics, while at the same time accounting for a wide range of quantum behavior. Among its many other contributions, Schrödinger’s equation effectively predicted the interference wave pattern that unobserved particles displayed during the double-slit experiment. Because Schrödinger’s equation retained the classical wave concept, it proved to be more conventionally intuitive and visualizable, and thus gained wide appeal among physicists.

Meanwhile, in July of 1925, Heisenberg had sent Born a copy of his paper On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics. Born and Pascual Jordan showed that Heisenberg’s results could be described in terms of mathematical matrices and the first coherent draft of the quantum interpretation was created.² In 1926, Heisenberg used the matrix equation to demonstrate that, in any attempt to discern certain conjugate states describing the physical properties of a subatomic particle (for example, position and momentum), there exists a fundamental limitation to the accuracy with which these properties can measured, and therefore known, simultaneously. Heisenberg named this limitation the Uncertainty Principle.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle described the consequences arising from the basic fact that the quantum world cannot be perceived directly, but only through the use of measuring instruments that inevitably interfere with the results. If one were to bombard an electron with a beam of light of a sufficiently short wavelength to determine accurately its position, energy would be unavoidably transferred to the electron, thus giving it a kick and making it impossible to discern with any accuracy its momentum. A fundamental condition of ascertaining the electron’s position, then, is that we disturb it in an incalculable way, and are thus prevented from ascertaining its speed and direction. Conversely, measuring an electron with a long wavelength of light avoids disturbing its momentum, but the longer wavelength is not focused enough to identify the electron’s position with any degree of accuracy. The more precisely one knows the position of a particle, then, the less precisely one knows its momentum, and vice versa. This, therefore, is the limitation described by the Uncertainty Principle: nothing is or can be known with any specificity about the state of a subatomic particle prior to the act of measurement; however, there exists no mode of measurement that can accurately reveal its state. This limitation cannot be attributed to a simple lack of technical innovation; it cannot be entirely resolved with less disruptive or more precise measuring instruments.³ Knowledge of both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle is a fundamental impossibility.

Unlike the wave-based formulation of Schrödinger, which retained the notions of determinism and continuity associated with classical physics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was essentially a particle-based model that emphasized the discontinuous, nondeterministic properties of atomic matter. Soon after Heisenberg published his paper on matrix mechanics, Schrödinger demonstrated that the matrix equation and the wavefunction equation were mathematically identical. In the same paper, he argued that his model was superior because of its greater visualizability and intuitiveness—a claim that Heisenberg, Born, and Wolfgang Pauli dismissed, even as they were undertaking efforts to make their own theory more visualizable.

If Heisenberg’s formulation favored particulate behavior, and Schrödinger’s model favored wave-like behavior, Niels Bohr’s approach attempted to account for both. In September of 1927, after receiving a letter from Heisenberg about his Uncertainty Principle, Bohr became convinced that the Uncertainty Principle was merely one manifestation of a deeper complementarity between particle and wave behavior. Bohr’s focus was more on evidence derived from experimental set-ups than on the mathematical formulations of Schrödinger and Heisenberg, particularly where the presence or absence of measurement determined which property—wave-like or particle-like—was demonstrated. Bohr’s focus on experimental results no doubt influenced his essentially pragmatic approach to this duality, as well as his concentration on what he believed could be communicated in language. Like Heisenberg and Schrödinger, Bohr was sensitive to the fact that the concepts of wave and particle were drawn from classical physics, where it was not possible for something to be both a wave and a particle at the same time. Rather than rejecting the classical terms, however, Bohr concluded that, since both the wave and particle experiments produced equally valid results, and since these outcomes were mutually exclusive, it was necessary to describe the two in complementary fashion in order to arrive at a full description of matter.

The origin of Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity is almost always associated exclusively with wave/particle duality; however, to reduce Bohr’s understanding of the notion of complementarity to this single duality is misleading, and disregards the subtle evolution in Bohr’s thinking about the relationship of quantum and classical physics. In fact, the wave/particle relation was one of the lesser dualities with which he was concerned. Over time, Bohr used the word complementarity to refer to all manner of paired relationships that he felt expressed reciprocal relations, so that it came to refer to complementary theoretical models, complementary atomic behavior, perceiving subject versus perceived object, and related experimental arrangements.⁴ Complementarity cannot be reduced to wave/particle duality because it includes the entire quantum situation, so that complementarity referred to a broad range of overlapping ontological, epistemological, and experiential concerns that occupied Bohr’s thinking.

A number of other key concepts formed the Copenhagen Interpretation or the Copenhagen-Gottingen Interpretation, so named because the principal players were working primarily either at Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen or at the University of Göttingen.⁵ One such concept was Max Born’s theory of probability, which reinterpreted Schrödinger’s physical waves as waves of probability—in other words, the probability of finding a particle in a particular state at a particular time. Schrödinger was distressed by this reinterpretation of his wavefunction, and Born’s theory contributed to the tension between Schrödinger and those involved in the creation of the quantum interpretation. Also contributing to the tension was the reintroduction of a concept that Bohr had developed earlier—that of quantum jumps. Quantum jumps described the transition between one electron state and another, but could not account for what went on between the two states, a fact that led Schrödinger to describe it as incoherent.

Derived first as a mathematical solution to a number of questions surrounding Schrödinger’s wave equation was the concept of superposition. According to the theory of superposition, prior to detection by a measuring instrument, a subatomic system can exist simultaneously in all theoretically possible states or configurations. Upon detection, however, the system reduces to a single state, an outcome referred to as the wavefunction collapse. Unobserved, the electron behaves according to the wavefunction. Observed, it becomes a particle. Thus, the act of observation actually changes the nature of matter in a fundamental way. This phenomenon is known as the observer effect.⁶ In relation to superposition and wavefunction collapse, Schrödinger posed a paradoxical thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat, where a cat enclosed in a box with a radioactive nuclear sample is said to be both dead and alive until the lid of the box is opened and the cat is observed. It is commonly believed that Schrödinger developed this thought experiment to illustrate this observer effect at the quantum level; however, he was actually pointing out the absurdity of superposition applied on a macrocosmic scale, and, more fundamentally, suggesting the inadequacy of the quantum interpretation as a full explanation of the nature of matter.⁷

Both the concept of superposition and the concept of the observer effect have produced a number of ontological, epistemological, and philosophical claims. Hugh Everett proposed the foundation for the most famous interpretation of superposition in 1957, in what he called the universal wavefunction, which denies the wavefunction collapse and asserts the objective (nonmathematical) reality of Schrödinger’s wavefunction.⁸ Bryce DeWitt later popularized Everett’s theory in the 1960s and 1970s with the much more appealingly named Many-Worlds Interpretation.⁹ The Many-Worlds Interpretation also rejects the wavefunction collapse, instead positing that a superposition of all alternative histories continues to exist. According to DeWitt, everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but did not, has occurred in the past of some other universe or universes. Each potential alternative is thus realized in some other actually existing universe, and there exists a potentially infinite number of universes—a condition also known as the multiverse. This interpretation arose despite the fact that the founders of the quantum interpretation took pains to clarify that the interference caused by the observer effect is initiated by the detecting device, and not by the human, subjective act of perceiving the outcome—a clarification that was lost in later invocations of quantum theory in the cultural sphere. The observer effect thus has frequently been translated as an observer/participant interaction, and has been used to support broad claims about the interaction between our consciousness and a knowing universe, as a model for participatory political structures, and as an interpretive tool describing the effect of the reader’s consciousness in the reception of literary texts.

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen wrote a paper containing a thought experiment that was designed to undermine the Uncertainty Principle and demonstrate that quantum physics was an incomplete theory. In the paper, they set out to prove that it actually was possible to measure conjugate states of particles because the measurement of one (which caused the wavefunction collapse into a single state) also caused the instantaneous collapse of the other (which then could be measured independently of the measuring apparatus).¹⁰ Instead, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen inadvertently generated mathematical proof that, under certain circumstances, quantum mechanics predicts a breakdown of locality. To be more specific, they showed that, in certain situations, the reduction of a property of one particle to a single state (say, a + spin) can cause another particle existing at a distance from the first to assume the opposite state (a – spin).¹¹ Even though the particles are far apart and not physically connected in any way, they appear to act together as a single system—one particle seems to have the ability to know what the other particle is doing and to respond in a corresponding manner instantaneously (i.e., faster than the speed of light—a theoretical impossibility). The mathematical proof derived in this paper came to be known as the EPR paradox. Following the paper’s publication, Schrödinger wrote a letter to Einstein about the EPR paradox, or nonlocality, in which he used the term entanglement to describe this interaction between two apparently unconnected particles.¹²

Experience, Perception, and the Limits of Language

Even more than Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum physics challenged, at its very foundations, everything that had been known and accepted for centuries about the relation between cause and effect, determinism, temporal and spatial relations, scientific observation, and the reality of the material world itself. Quantum behavior defies fundamental aspects of our experience, which means that any attempt to describe this behavior in language, which derives from perceptions tied to that everyday experience, necessarily strays toward misrepresentation. Given the challenges of representing quantum phenomena—challenges that so preoccupied Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg’s observations about language—I view my initial explanation of the core concepts in quantum physics as only the first step in a series of iterations. As I move throughout this book, I return again and again to these concepts via a host of different contexts and perspectives, an iterative process wherein I circle back to them repeatedly, correcting obvious misuses, but always aware of the not quite that shadows my correction.

In chapter 1, I uncover the association between language’s origin in ordinary sense-based experience of the physical world, and the intractability of quantum phenomena to concepts such as entity and causality, as well as to linguistic representation. I demonstrate Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg’s uniquely reflective approach to the relationship between quantum concepts, experience, perception, language, and the material world, and the extent to which the three men understood the problematic relationship between the quantum realm and the realms of perception, concepts, and language as an inevitable outcome of how each was structured. I show how, for them, quantum physics’ disruption of this linkage between sense perception and concept formation initiated a crisis of representation that undermined any attempt to communicate accurately their findings.

To provide an expanded framework for why and in what terms Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg claimed that it was impossible to separate quantum phenomena from questions of perception and language, I draw from Conceptual Metaphor Theory—in particular, its core proposition that there exists a clear correlation between the kinds of concepts human beings are capable of forming and the fact that our primary metaphors are acquired as both a natural and culturally determined function of the way the human body interacts with the material environment.¹³ I focus especially on how language and metaphor derive from our sense/perception-based experience of ourselves as embodied and bounded, with particular spatial orientations, and how we use this understanding to formulate our ideas and our descriptions of objects, which we similarly construct as fixed, delimited entities that are oriented in space.

My initial sense that Conceptual Metaphor Theory might prove to be a productive model for my analysis emerged from the striking manner in which this model is prefigured in the terms used by Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg to articulate the problems surrounding the quantum interpretation—including their concern with how the quantum object fundamentally disrupts our spatial orientation, connected as it is to the sort of bodies that we have and how we interact with our physical environment. The fact that our basic orientation to the material world is spatial, with clearly defined boundaries between things, and the fact that we experience the passing of time as continuous motion, cannot be accommodated by quantum theory. My conviction that Conceptual Metaphor Theory provides the best model for my purposes also emerges from how effectively it illuminates key representational and linguistic problems posed by the quantum interpretation. These problems include the fact that quantum phenomena exist only as probabilities or tendencies toward being; that they are essentially discontinuous and cannot be said ever to exist at a particular time and place; and that they transform under the act of observation. When viewed through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, these sorts of problems—how and why the quantum interpretation violates fundamental aspects of our experience—are brought to the fore in a manner that highlights the problems with language that so preoccupied Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg.

I find Conceptual Metaphor Theory persuasive in its construction of the relationship between embodiment and our conventional perception/representation of the external world, and very effective in highlighting the issues introduced by Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, and their colleagues. I am also aware that other theories of language, embodiment, and experience—most obviously, poststructuralism and more generally postmodernism—align with how quantum physics problematizes language as an expression of experience, as well as the notion of a bounded self. Some have argued (as I will discuss in chapter 3) that quantum physics is an expression of poststructuralism’s recognition that language is self-reflexive, and of deconstructionism’s undermining of being and presence. One might also argue that postmodernism’s refiguring of the body and identity as permeable and contingent aligns with the way quantum physics undermines the concept of self-consistent things. While these theories provoke essential discussions on the nature of language and the subject, the fact remains that in our ordinary, everyday experience of the world, and in our language, the majority of us remain tied to the notion of ourselves as separate and discrete entities. Certainly, the primary interpreters of quantum physics saw the problem of quantum physics in these terms, and it had far-reaching implications for them.

Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Bohr were highly sensitive to the fact that even assigning a name to a quantum phenomenon was already to impose habitual notions onto utterly novel circumstances, and Bohr spoke for both Heisenberg and Schrödinger when he observed that conventional terminology had to be retained because you haven’t got anything else. The necessity of using conventional terms such as wave, particle, complementary, observer, uncertainty, and entanglement introduced into quantum concepts what might be called an originary drift—originary, because the drift emerges simultaneously with the naming of the concept. While I acknowledge that all language mediates and to some extent constructs reality, I maintain that quantum physics is exceptional in the degree to which the behavior of quantum phenomena, which can be expressed mathematically with a high degree of accuracy and specificity, are especially subject to misrepresentation once they enter language. I draw from Liliane Papin’s argument that Indo-European languages can only poorly represent quantum physics because these languages are based broadly on a structural division between nouns, associated with thingness (or entities), and verbs, which denote actions or states of being. This structural bias in language, I argue, means that quantum terminology is not merely a screen that reflects or deflects our view of the quantum world; rather, the structure of language precludes the accurate representation of quantum phenomena.

Particularly in their later efforts to appeal to a wider audience, Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg introduced extended conceits that went beyond describing quantum phenomena as entities and cast them in specifically human terms. I explore their (sometimes hesitant and reluctant) rhetorical strategy of using anthropomorphism to describe subatomic behavior, examining the implications of metaphorical conceits that include references to electrons as military formations and probabilities in terms of the collective versus the individual. I conclude chapter 1 with an exploration of how they used metaphors of journey and architecture to describe the relationship between classical and quantum physics, the role of the scientists, and the scientific project itself.

The Physics of Visuality, Intuition, and Aesthetics

In chapter 2, I demonstrate how Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg’s respective understanding of what could and could not be said about the quantum world both emerged from and defined each man’s approach to the complex relationship between visuality, intuition, and aesthetics. In the first section I offer an account of the "visualizability (anschaulichkeit) debate that went on primarily between Schrödinger, who argued in favor of a visualizable model of the material world, and Heisenberg, who defended his abstract, algebraic, and highly unvisualizable quantum matrix interpretation. I reject, however, the common assumption that Heisenberg was entirely against a visualizable model, and I show how, despite his public repudiation of the visualizability imperative," Heisenberg was in fact preoccupied with how far the quantum interpretation fell short of the demands of visualizability, and how his, Max Born’s, and Wolfgang Pauli’s revisions to the quantum interpretation—including the introduction of quantum jumps and of the Uncertainty Principle for which Heisenberg is most remembered—were in part inspired by his desire to make his model more visualizable.

I describe how the struggle over the meaning and value of what constituted an intuitive model of the material world generated a similarly heated debate within the atomic physics community. Examining, in the context of the quantum interpretation, the different commentaries and rhetorical strategies around the concept of intuition (anschauung), I offer an interpretation of the relationship between the physical world and human understanding, and of what a debate over the proper meaning and use of a concept seemingly unrelated to science can reveal about historical struggles over which scientific theory will prevail.

After contextualizing how the concept of intuition arises in relation to the quantum interpretation, I examine Schrödinger’s insistence that any intuitive theory of matter must remain intelligible in future scientific paradigms, as well as the rhetorical strategies that he used to make matrix mechanics appear unscientific. I proceed to analyze how Bohr’s symbolic turn represents a different relationship to intuition, particularly in the emphasis that he places on the description of the entire quantum situation, which includes experimental arrangements, experimental evidence, observation, and classical concepts. I argue that Bohr sees the classical concepts as symbolic idealizations, rather than as conduits for our absorption and processing of data. To the extent that, in Bohr’s model, we have access to concepts such as wave and particle, then, we can apply a customary form of intuition, but to the extent that these concepts become a function of description rather than reality, we must endeavor to reach beyond our usual ways of knowing.

I follow with an account of Heisenberg’s attempt to break entirely with the customary definition of intuition, and I trace the complex logic that Heisenberg pursues in his attempt to rid the concept of intuition entirely of its conventional associations and to redefine it in a manner that would put to rest accusations that the abstract algebra of his matrix mechanics was hopelessly unintuitive. Through close readings of Heisenberg’s writings and interviews from the 1920s to the 1960s, I uncover the rhetorical strategies that he used in an attempt to establish the fact that the unintuitive aspects of his model reflect merely the limitations of the linguistic resources and modes of communication that are currently available.

I then analyze how the implicit and explicit aesthetic preferences of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger complement the formal aspects of their atomic theories. I show how, where it concerns their aesthetic sensibilities, there is a good deal of accord among Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg, particularly with respect to two notions: harmony and simplicity. I trace how all three men privilege harmony in particular, and how both Bohr and Heisenberg find harmony through unity in multiplicity—Heisenberg, in the way that the quantum interpretation imposes order on a set of confusing, because seemingly irreconcilable, quantum phenomena. I argue that Bohr also stresses unification, which is a driving force for how he approaches the natural world, starting with the symbolic unity of classical concepts that defines his Principle of Complementarity, and extending to his belief in the shared interests of fields of knowledge other than his own.

I connect Schrödinger’s belief that one must only describe those aspects of the material world that can be recorded to his acceptance of the blank spaces of his contemporaneous art. I then demonstrate how Bohr’s complementarity represents symbolically-oriented classical concepts of harmony and reciprocity. Finally, I show how, drawing from the Platonic tradition, Heisenberg locates the foundation of aesthetics in the symmetry, harmony, and truth of mathematics, and that his aesthetics represent a logical extension of Bohr’s. For Heisenberg, I argue, simplicity lies in the purity of mathematical forms, for Bohr in the fundamentals of description that regardless of the theory or context must take on classical form, and for Schrödinger in the spare expression of the object’s core characteristics. In some respects, despite the novelty of their theories, all three men are classical in their sensibilities: each one seeks out the one in the many, the unity in difference, and the essential in, as Heisenberg puts it, the plethora of details.

Following my analysis in chapters 1 and 2 of how quantum concepts led Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg to reflect on experience and experiment, perception and observation, metaphor and communication, I investigate when and how the productive imprecision of quantum terminology resurfaced to provide an interpretive framework for a broad set of agendas, sensibilities, practices, and worldviews. Because quantum phenomena cannot be rooted in any particular experience, they can take root, albeit imperfectly and temporarily, in any experience. Because quantum phenomena have such an oblique relationship both to language and experience, the terminology used to describe them is exceptionally nomadic, and can be applied to support everything from novel methodologies in literary criticism, to new and post-New Age associations of the quantum with Eastern mysticism, to reconceptualizations of global politics. As I follow this quantum trail in chapters 3 and 4, I analyze commonalities and differences in the way each new context appropriates, refigures, and redeploys quantum concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, uncertainty, and the observer effect on a macrocosmic scale. Reflecting on the precise form of each new context’s deployment and strategic distortion of quantum concepts allows me at once to loop back and further clarify the original quantum concepts, and to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural needs and expectations, as well as the various constellations of hopes and anxieties that quantum concepts are conscripted to serve.

The Literary Turn

In chapter 3, I turn to the emergence in the 1980s of quantum theory as