Metaphor and Copenhagen Interpretation

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Copenhagen Interpretation, Embodiment, Haldane, J.B.S., Metaphor, Science, Wilson, Robert Anton |

The mathematician JBS Haldane famously observed that ‘the universe may not only be queerer than we think but queerer than we can think’. He intended this observation to apply specifically to the more esoteric aspects of the universe encountered mainly by astronomers and particle physicists, whose equations do indeed describe a world which is inconceivable in any literal sense, and which makes no intuitive appeal to the senses of even the most highly trained. As Richard Feynman put it, ‘if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’

Haldane’s comment finds theoretical support and application within the so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum theory introduced by Bohr and Heisenberg. Part of the application of this principle requires an attitude towards that application which recognises the distinctly partial ontological status of such theories. As Robert Anton Wilson colloquially put it, ‘the equations of quantum mechanics do not describe what is happening in the quantum world, but what structures of thought we need to create in order to think about that world’. Recent work done in the field of cognitive linguistics and cognate fields suggests that these ’structures of thought’ are largely built out of embodied metaphors, and it is these metaphors, grounded in concrete sensibilities of the body and the sensorimotor system, which give accessible form and order to the queerest aspect of the universe.

The attitude one must bring to the Copenhagen Interpretation has occasionally been referred to as ‘model agnosticism’: an approach to abstract theoretical constructs such as equations, models, structures etc, which recognises their usefulness whilst simultaneously also recognising their status as ‘man-made’ artifacts, rather than as material facts