Abstract
A little-known movie by Alfred Hitchcock, Torn Curtain (1966) — admittedly not one of his best — tells a story of spying and science. It features a strange scene, where two physicists confront one another on some theoretical question. Their “discussion”, if it may be so called, consists solely in one of them writing some equations on the blackboard, only to have the other angrily grabbing the eraser and wiping out the formulas to write new ones of his own, etc., without ever uttering a single word. This picture of theoretical physics as an aphasic knowledge entirely consisting of mathematical symbols, as common as it may be in popular representations, we know to be wrong, of course, and we have to acknowledge that, far from being mute, we are a very talkative kind; physics is made out of words. What I wish to question here, however, is the very nature of our relationship with language, particularly as concerns quantum theory. My thesis will be that we have been somewhat offhand and rather indifferent with respect to the words we use, or rather without respect for them, and that this attitude has reinforced, and sometimes perhaps even produced some of the persisting epistemological and pedagogical difficulties in our field — not to speak of the new cultural problems that we are facing.
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Notes
Niels Bohr, in P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Evanston: The Library of Living Philosophers 1949, pp. 200–241.
Niels Bohr, as reported by Petersen (1968), in J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek (Eds), Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983, p. 7.
Niels Bohr, “Physical Science and the Study of Religions”, Studia Orientalia banni Pedersen septuagenario A.D. VII id. Nov. Anno MCMLIII, Copenhagen: Ginar Mimles-Gaard 1953, pp. 385–390.
James Clerk Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”, in Phil. Trans. R.Soc. 155, 1865, pp.459–512.
Quoted by John Hendry, James Clerk Maxwell and the Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Adam-Hilger 1986, p.267.
The role of “safeguard” played by “complementarity” and its relation with the question of the limits of the ordinary language has been analyzed by Catherine Chevalley, “Complémentarité et langage dans l’interprétation de Copenhague”, Rev. Hist. Sci XXXVIII-3/4, 1985, pp. 251–292.
Erwin Schrödinger, letter to Léon Brillouin, Bozen, 6 November 1959, New-York: American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library-Brillouin Archives (unpublished, courtesy of Rémi Mosseri).
See the recently published “manuscript of 1942”: Werner Heisenberg, Ordnung der Wirklichkeit,Munich: Piper 1989. The question is discussed by Catherine Chevalley in the presentation of her French translation, Werner Heisenberg, Philosophie, Le manuscrit de 1942,Paris: Seuil 1998, pp. 153–187.
Erwin Schrödinger, letter to Léon Brillouin, Bozen, 16 October 1959, New-York: American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library-Brillouin Archives (unpublished, courtesy of Rémi Mosseri).
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond & Françoise Balibar, “When did the indeterminacy principle become the uncertainty principle?” (Answer to Query #62), American Journal of Physics 66, 1998, pp.278–279.
For instance, Schrödinger, in his essential 1935 paper, while speaking of the “Heisenberg Ungenauigkeitsbeziehung”, calls “Toleranz-oder Variationsbreiten” the quantities involved; Erwin Schrödinger, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik”, Die Naturwissenschaften 1935, pp. 807–812,823–828, 844–849.
Werner Heisenberg, Zeitschrift fir Physik 33, 1925, pp.879; English translation in B.L. van der Waerden (Ed.), Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Amsterdam: New Holland 1967.
See the contribution of Catherine Chevalley in this volume, “Why do we find Bohr obscure?”.
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, Cambridg: MIT Press, 1967.
See Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, “Classical Apples and Quantum Potatoes”, Eur.J. Phys. 2, 1981, pp.44-, and “Neither Waves, nor Particles, but Quantons”, Nature 334, 1988, p. 6177.
As a very recent example, see S. Dürr, T. Nonn & G. Remp, “Origin of Quantum-mechanical Complementarity probed by a `which-way’ Experiment in an Atom Interferometer”, Nature 395, 1998, pp. 33–37. In this paper, the whole epistemological discussion of the results of a beautiful experiment is marred by a fake opposition between “complementarity” and “uncertainty”, both unsuitable.
The textbook by Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond & Françoise Balibar, Quanti ca (t.1, Rudiments),Amsterdam: North-Holland 1984, puts in practice some of these recommendations.
For a collective analysis and rebuttal, see B. Jurdant ed., Impostures scientifiques, Paris: La Découverte 1996; and Alliage n°35–36, Nice: Anais 1998.
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Lévy-Leblond, JM. (1999). Quantum Words for a Quantum World. In: Greenberger, D., Reiter, W.L., Zeilinger, A. (eds) Epistemological and Experimental Perspectives on Quantum Physics. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [1999], vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1454-9_5
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