The Word with a Loophole and the Word with a Sideward Glance: Dialogical Approach in Science and Literature

Einstein is known to have believed that it is not the brain that controls human beings but the spinal cord —the seat, as it were, of instincts and blind passions —and that even scientists are no exception to this. The history of quantum physics could lend support to such words, and this might have been the reason for my initial fascination with the subject. Reading the correspondence of the founders of quantum physics, I was captured by a wide range of emotions and by the intense personal nature of scientific theorizing. Inflamed passions, wounded egos, mental strain and outspoken hostility: these were the elements of a most captivating drama. In my early papers I attempted to estimate their possible impact on the very content of the ideas that emerged (Beller 1990, 1992a, 1992b), yet gradually, I came to realize that scientific correspondence disclosed something more fundamental, less striking perhaps, but no less fascinating.

While I studied in detail the intricate paths along which ideas emerged as the founders of quantum physics addressed each other in their letters, the very fact of addressivity, which I came to recognize as indispensable for the possibility of thought, overshadowed my occupation with emotional coloring. I began to see clear traces of dialogical addressivity in manuscripts and scientific articles, and I gradually realized that it permeates not only scientific correspondence but also published scientific works. More generally, I came to the realization that scientific creativity is dialogical and communicative at its most elementary and fundamental level, and that narratives based on the static concepts, such as conceptual frameworks, paradigms, or models, conceal this basic addressivity, as well as the diversity, complexity, ambiguity and open-endedness of scientific effort. This is what, for me, the book Quantum Dialogue(Beller 1999) was about, and since completing it I have become interested in more general questions of dialogical approach, in its cultural and historical aspects, including the issues of dialogism in literary criticism and in the sociology of knowledge. I shall briefly relate to some of these issues in the present paper.

To say that science is practiced in a communicative network is, of course, to state a platitude of current studies of science. There is also an enormous amount of excellent historical studies of scientific dialogues and controversies. Everybody will agree that communication and conversation are fundamental for science. But in what way, exactly, are they fundamental? Can we find appropriate concepts that would genuinely express this communicative nature of science instead of merely acknowledging its existence? It is on these issues that, I believe, the dialogical approach of Quantum Dialogue differs from the existing accounts, and I shall try to demonstrate in what way.

In order to point out the distinctive features of a dialogical approach, it is best to start with a concrete example. The example I have chosen is the description of the discovery of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as it figures in his recollections and other historical accounts in contrast to its description in Quantum Dialogue (chapters 4 and 5). A brief reminder of the history of quantum mechanics might be helpful.

In 1925 the young Werner Heisenberg laid the foundations of the new quantum theory by eliminating the electronic orbits of Bohr's model and replacing the classical parameters of motion by algebraic constructs, which turned out to be matrices. Through this step, Heisenberg effectively abandoned the Anschaulichkeit ("visualizability") of the quantum domain and dispensed with regular space-time concepts. A few months after the appearance of matrix mechanics, Schrödinger published his first paper on wave mechanics, in which he employed regular space-time concepts. Schrödinger envisaged the possibility of providing a physical interpretation of atomic processes by eliminating the Bohrian concepts of stationary states and quantum jumps and argued in favor of the superiority of his approach over Heisenberg's because of its Anschaulichkeit.

After the appearance of Schrödinger's theory, and especially his rival interpretation, Heisenberg often contemplated interpretive issues of the new quantum theory. How is one to interpret the new formalism, when...