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Comment: Robert P Crease
that lay beyond science itself. These popularizations
encountered an enthusiastic
audience. Artists, novelists, poets and
journalists were fascinated by the non-
Newtonian features of quantum mechanics,
including discontinuity, uncertainty,
unpredictability, and differences across
scales and areas where scientists could
not take themselves out of measurements.
Quantum terms and concepts – including
quantum leap, uncertainty principle,
complementarity, Schrödinger’s cat and
parallel worlds – eventually appeared in
everyday language in sparkling prose and
flamboyant metaphors.
But has the cultural impact of quantum
mechanics been simply to supply us with a
storehouse of unusual, vivid and sometimes
pretentious or even loopy images? Or has
the cumulative effect been more serious,
and reshaped how even non-scientists view
the world?
To some extent, the quantum’s impact
on artists, writers and philosophers was
that it helped free themselves from their
own Newtonian-inspired misconceptions.
A year or two after the discovery of the
uncertainty principle in 1927, for instance,
the writer D H Lawrence penned the following
poem fragment.
I like relativity and quantum theories
Because I don’t understand them.
And they make me feel as if space shifted
About like a swan that can’t settle,
Refusing to sit still and be measured;
And as if the atom were an impulsive thing
Always changing its mind.
Lawrence’s playfully negative remarks
may suggest that his attraction is superficial:
he likes relativity and quantum theories
because they connect better with his
experiences of the world as quixotic and
immeasurable. A similar sentiment was
expressed by the Austrian-Mexican artist
Wolfgang Paalen in 1942 when he wrote
excitedly that quantum mechanics heralds
“a new order in which science will no longer
pretend to a truth more absolute than that
of poetry”. The outcome, he continued, will
be to legitimize the value of the humanities,
and “science will understand the value of
art as complementary to her own”.
Meanwhile, in 1958 when the New York
University philosopher William Barrett
reviewed 20th century scientific developments,
including quantum mechanics, he
concluded that they paint an image of man
“that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked,
and more questionable aspect”. We have
been forced to confront our “solitary and
groundless condition” not only through
existentialist philosophy but also via science
itself, which has triggered “a denudation,
a stripping down, of this being who has
now to confront himself at the centre of all
his horizons”.
physicsworld.com
Popular physics A couple walks past “Quantum Field-X3”, an installation by Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata,
outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Such remarks suggest that humanists
embraced quantum mechanics because
they experienced the Newtonian universe
as a cold and constricting place in which
they felt defensive and marginalized – with
the news of the strangeness of the quantum
domain coming almost as a relief. But if this
is the only reason humanists found developments
of the quantum world liberating, it
was surely their own doing, for they were
relying far too seriously on science to begin
with in understanding their own experience.
A new humanism
In 1967 the critic and novelist John Updike
wrote a brief reflection on the photographs
and amateur films taken in Dealey Plaza
in Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963, in
the few momentous seconds when President
John F Kennedy’s motorcade drove
through and he was hit by an assassin’s
bullets. The more closely and carefully the
frames were examined, Updike noted, the
less sense the things in them made. Who
was the “umbrella man” sporting an open
umbrella despite it being a sunny day? Who
was the “tan-coated man” who first runs
away, then is seen in “a gray Rambler driven
by a Negro?” What about the blurry figure
in the window next to the one from which
the shots were fired? Were these innocent
bystanders or part of a conspiracy?
“We wonder,” Updike wrote, “whether
a genuine mystery is being concealed here
26 Physics World March 2013
Reuters/Vincent West