Word: qm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most explicit attempt to address QM in literature can be found in Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen,” which imagines and reimagines the enigmatic meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Nazi-occupied Denmark of 1941. Heisenberg was working on the Nazi nuclear project (either on a bomb or a reactor—we still don’t know); Bohr was a Dane, and would later flee due to his Jewish ancestry. The meeting ended badly, and the two, once the best of friends, never spoke again...
...quickly descends into an endless pun about uncertainty—as in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—which the play itself never quite cognizes. The work suffers from an overabundance of mere observations of the ways human behavior can correspond with anthropomorphic interpretations of QM. This method is inherently problematic; the physics can really only tell us the outcomes of experiments concerning the quantum world. At best it allows room to imagine what subatomic particles do, but that has nothing to do with what humans...
...QM, on the other hand, firstly is impossible to visualize, and secondly doesn’t really alter our conceptions of such everyday things. What it talks about are things that have nothing to do with our everyday experience. Relativity explains why apples fall from trees onto physicists’ heads, why the year divides into warmth and cold—perennial questions. QM resolves relatively esoteric problems, and its subject matter is neither planets nor ballistics, but rather subatomic particles. It admittedly alters our conception of causality, though not as significantly as an artist might desire...
...What QM does have, however, is the word, “uncertainty.” Uncertainty is a mathematical relation between certain pairs of measurable qualities, like position and momentum. It says that if you can measure X to within a degree of certitude, then the maximum certitude you can get for Y is a function of the certitude for X. As a consequence of wave-particle duality, you can’t measure both quantities as accurately as you want to. What this means epistemologically and metaphysically is perpetually up for debate...
...saying that QM doesn’t have a place in literature. On the contrary, I’m afraid that literature has not yet adequately engaged with some of our strangest and most delightful mysteries. Instead, it’s gone remarkably astray in the hopes creating spaces from which to exercise negative capability...