RT Article
T1 Quantum Mechanics and “Song of Myself”: Getting a Grip on Reality
JF Zygon
VO 38
IS 1
SP 25
OP 48
A1 Schaible, Robert M.
LA English
YR 2003
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1827955821
AB Most recent writing linking science and literature has concerned itself with challenges to the epistemological status of scientific knowledge in an attempt to demonstrate its contingency, arguing in the more radical efforts that the structures of science are no more than useful fictions. This essay also includes an epistemological comparison between science and literature, but instead of making grand or meta–statements about the nature of knowing generally in the two fields, mine is a much narrower aim. My exploration entails two tasks. First, I provide a close–up look at a particular type of experiment, called the delayed–choice experiment, which clearly reveals the strangeness of the quantum world. In connection with this experiment, I discuss wave functions—mathematical expressions used by physicists to describe quantum behavior and predict the outcome of experiments involving quanta. Second, I look at Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” focusing on the meaning of the “self” in the poem. My aim is to treat the object of study in each field as a “text” and to assert and demonstrate a parallel in the strategies of thought and response between physicists (“readers”) pondering the meaning and status of a wave function and poem readers pondering the meaning and status of the poem's self. In Whitman's “Song” we find an attempt to understand complex aspects of human experience that are said to transcend ordinary reality, an effort for which I believe there are parallels in the attempts of modern physicists to understand complex, nonintuitive aspects of the subatomic world. While not making the kind of broad claims eschewed above, I do suggest that this focused study has interesting implications since both the wave function and the poem's self force their respective sets of “readers” to confront questions of ultimacy—to consider, that is, epistemological and ontological issues of more than passing interest to students of science as well as those of metaphysics and theology.
K1 transcendent Self
K1 thematic formalism
K1 signifier
K1 signified
K1 Sign
K1 quantum wave function
K1 quantum reality
K1 quantum facts
K1 potentia
K1 Mysticism
K1 Metaphysics
K1 mathematical formalism
K1 delayed–choice experiment
K1 correspondential and instrumental notions of truth
K1 Copenhagen Interpretation
DO 10.1111/1467-9744.00475