Quantum Language and the Migration of Scientific Concepts - Softcover

Burwell, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262055775 ISBN 13: 9780262055772

Publisher: MIT Press, 2025

Synopsis

How highly abstract quantum concepts were represented in language, and how these concepts were later taken up by philosophers, literary critics, and new-age gurus.

The principles of quantum physics—and the strange phenomena they describe—are represented most precisely in highly abstract algebraic equations. Why, then, did these mathematically driven concepts compel founders of the field, particularly Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, to spend so much time reflecting on ontological, epistemological, and linguistic concerns? What is it about quantum concepts that appeals to latter-day Eastern mystics, poststructuralist critics, and get-rich-quick schemers? How did their interpretations and misinterpretations of quantum phenomena reveal their own priorities? In this book, Jennifer Burwell examines these questions and considers what quantum phenomena—in the context of the founders' debates over how to describe them—reveal about the relationship between everyday experience, perception, and language.

Drawing on linguistic, literary, and philosophical traditions, Burwell illuminates representational and linguistic problems posed by quantum concepts—the fact, for example, that quantum phenomena exist only as probabilities or tendencies toward being and cannot be said to exist in a particular time and place. She traces the emergence of quantum theory as an analytic tool in literary criticism, in particular the use of wave/particle duality in interpretations of gender differences in the novels of Virginia Woolf and critics' connection of Bohr's Principle of Complementarity to poetic form; she examines the “quantum mysticism” of Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav; and she concludes by analyzing “nuclear discourse” in the context of quantum concepts, arguing that it, too, adopts a language of the unthinkable and the indescribable.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Burwell is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262055775
• ISBN 13: 9780262055772
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 337