Time&Eternity

Time in the Formulation of Scientific Theory 157
Kunstsprache]. Portions of this artificial language are gradually integrated
into everyday language. This applies, for example, to the concepts of energy,
impulse, entropy, and electrical field. 234 By its expansion into areas that are
not directly accessible to sensory experience, modern physics has made the
limitation or even failure of language at certain points even more obvious.
One has been forced to rethink what were apparently simple concepts, for
example, space, place, time, and velocity. The theory of relativity was rather
successful in adapting the spoken language to the artificial mathematical
language. By supplementing “simultaneous” with the qualifier “relative to a
certain reference system,” for example, the question of whether time dilatation
is real or only apparent becomes irrelevant. 235 The insight “that the
world is ‘really’ not the way that everyday concepts would lead us to believe”
has made its way into general consciousness. 236
There are much greater difficulties for language in the area of the very
small—in atomic physics. When one and the same object can occur either
as a particle or as a wave, depending upon the experiment, then it is hard to
adapt everyday language successfully to the artificial mathematical language.
Language does not have a word for something that is simultaneously
a wave and a solid body. Instead, “word paintings” [Wortgemälde] are used,
i.e., a manner of speaking in which one alternately uses different, mutually
contradicting pictorial images. 237 Heisenberg has no doubt that one must
speak of atoms and subatomic particles in (normal) language: “We must
speak about them because, otherwise, we cannot understand our experiments.”
238 For Heisenberg, therefore, scientific understanding is accomplished
only by means of language, and indeed no less in everyday language
than in artificial mathematical language. An adequate description of
processes in the quantum realm is attained “first by playing with the different
images.” 239
In the case of quantum physics, Heisenberg sees the reason for the difficulties
in adapting the imprecise, metaphorical language of everyday speech
to the artificial mathematical language in the fact that Aristotelian logic
loses its validity in a language that tries to do justice to the mathematical
formalism of quantum theory. A language responding to the demands of
quantum physics requires a logic that allows not only the alternative “either
right or wrong” for assertions, but also interim values that may not be interpreted
as ignorance of the “true” state. 240 Heisenberg thinks that such a
quantum logic 241 can be implemented if different logics are used for different
linguistic levels (e.g., objects—statements about objects—statements
about statements about objects), in which case Aristotelian logic would
again have to be used on the highest level. 242 An ontological parallel to
quantum logic would be the talk of coexisting conditions, or even better,