Literature & Science

Physics progresses most when it’s presented with paradoxes.

He made the agreeable suggestion that after death it would be possible to compare notes with astronomers from other planets.

“ . . . William Empson’s concept of ambiguity was a decidedly Cambridge invention; by getting rid of the either/or mentality that had been prevalent in literary analysis he was bringing to literary criticism a way of thinking inaugurated by Albert Einstein but familiar in the universe of the physicist Paul Dirac; the young and prodigious Empson . . . . was ‘the first man to see the literature of the past through quantum theory’s altered notion of reality.”

In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' (note the scare quotes)... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor.

Physical determinism, we might say in retrospect, was a daydream of omniscience which seemed to become more real with every advance of physics until it became an apparently inescapable nightmare.