Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He…

Can you be a "fan" of a physicist? If so, I'm Niels Bohr's. This book delivers him to us with graphic excellence and no stinting on his conceptual wizardry. "How wonderful that we have met a paradox!" said Bohr, and here's a paradox - a comic about quantum mechanics! I've read it twice now, with a few years between readings, and I'll bet I'll do it again. The cast of characters - Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, etc. - is superstar quality. The context - the history of the 20th Century - is profound. The science - from Newton's action at a distance to "quantum entanglement" as developed by Bohr, Schroedinger, and others - is impeccable. Finally, Ottaviani leads us into Bohr's thoughts about linguistics and the problems of using words and sentences to describe the bewildering world of subatomic particles. Thus the title of the book - we are Suspended in Language, limited to using our conventional terms to describe something radically unconventional. Language is made up of parts, and as Hermann Weyl put it in 1931, "...quantum theory subscribes to the view that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' which has recently been raised to the status of a philosophical creed by the Vitalists and the Gestalt Psychologists." Quantum theory allows us to peek at the Whole. Einstein criticized it as incomplete, which of course it must be, as must be any of our linguistic or mathematical or pictorial attempts to depict the mysterious Whole. Bohr understood this - on page 254 Ottaviani has him saying, "And so we are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is 'up' and what is 'down.'" ( )

http://6impossiblethings.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/suspended-in-language/ ( )