Quantum Language and the Migration of Scientific Concepts

This book explores how the main challenge posed by quantum phenomena lies in how these phenomena strain the limits of comprehension. The elusive nature of the quantum domain, and its problematic relationship to representation in language, motivate the key questions that I address in this book. Why, for instance, did these mathematically driven concepts compel the founders of quantum physics—in particular German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Danish physicists Niels Bohr, and Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger—to spend so much time reflecting upon the nature and limitations of language? What does quantum subatomic behavior, considered in the context of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger’s debates on how to describe it, reveal about the relationship between everyday experience and metaphor? How—and why—do quantum concepts get taken up again fifty years after their formulation in cultural contexts far removed from their origins in physics?