Brian Greene's 'The Elegant Universe'

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.  And it fully agrees with experiment.  So I hope you can accept nature as She is—absurd.

~Richard Feynman (quoted in Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe)

When studying literature and science, it’s not always clear what exactly we’re talking about.  Are we discussing scientific topics in fictional narratives, or the way that narrativization can help us understand science… or both?  Or are we discussing something less unidirectional?  Do science and literature share isomorphic patterns of behavior and organization?  Do they intersect with one another, culturally and socially speaking?  Might they even illuminate various qualities of the other, offering insightful ways to understand their parallel developments?  Personally speaking, I don’t think that “literature and science” means any one methodology or approach, but a host of perspectives on what humanities academics call cultural production—that is, modes of inscription that contribute to how we know the world around us, as Pierre Bourdieu explored in The Field of Cultural Production.

            For example, take a famous principle of twentieth-century physics: Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  Now a staple of quantum mechanics and central to our understanding of the universe, the uncertainty principle asserts that reality, at the level of quanta (the microscopically small), is indeterminate.  Subatomic particles cannot be described as having both determinate speed and being in a determinate place.  This is not a limitation on our observational capacities, but an apparently fundamental characteristic of reality according to experimental results.  In a realistic sense, the uncertainty principle describes something wholly non-textual: the fabric of reality.  But “uncertainty” is not available in nature, as it were; it’s our concept for framing what we observe at the quantum level.  In other words, it’s a mode of inscription—a narrative—that produces knowledge about something.

            I’ve been thinking more about the relationship between literature and science lately while reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which might be the most exciting scientific text I’ve come across in a while.  I always love reading about “weird science,” and nothing gets much weirder than theoretical physics.  Greene narrates the shifts from Newtonian physics to relativity to quantum mechanics and beyond with ease and clarity, and his creative examples are particularly helpful (not to mention entertaining).  But what caught my eye was a particular analogy in his explanation of Richard Feynman’s interpretation of the famous double-slit experiment, in which a beam of light fired at a photographic plate must pass through a barrier with two slits in it.  According to classical physics, the photographic plate should reflect two steady columns of light corresponding to the two slits; but instead, the light particles behave as waves, producing an interference pattern that splays several columns out across the plate.  Feynman’s contribution to this multifaceted experiment was that not only do the light particles (specifically, electrons) behave as waves, and not only do they just go through one slit—in fact, they pass through both slits; what’s more, he proposed that the electrons fired at the photographic plate traverse “every possible trajectory simultaneously.”

            According to Feynman, the electrons in the double-slit experiment travel—impossibly, it would seem—an unfathomable number of paths: through the left slit, through the right, into your neighbor’s bathroom, and to the edge of the Oort Cloud.  In fact, the particles of all matter, Feynman theorized, are constantly pursuing all imaginable paths simultaneously.  So how do objects such as tables, cars, buildings, and human beings, hang together if our electrons are popping to vast reaches of the galaxy?  Feynman suggested that in large objects, the immense multitude of paths cancel each other out—except for one.  And that path is the path the object takes: your commute to work, the plane from New York to Los Angeles, the apple that, as legend has it, fell on Newton’s head.  In this way, quantum weirdness is brought in line with Newtonian physics (at least to an extent).  At this point, Greene offers the following analogy:

Just as we may find that varying interpretations of a book or a film can be more or less helpful in aiding our understanding of different aspects of the work, the same is true of the different approaches to quantum mechanics.

I appreciate this example for its perceptive alignment of the sciences and the humanities.  The humanities, like the sciences, offer perspectives on various problems.  Some perspectives will end up being more helpful than others, and discourse rewards these perspectives.  The perfect understanding of a problem doesn’t emerge out of one interpretation, but from a constantly recombining multitude.

            Although largely about the many avenues of string theory, Greene spends the first hundred pages or so documenting the shifts from Newtonian mechanics to physics today (or 1999, when The Elegant Universe was published).  This framework offers readers the advantage of witnessing scientific revolution in the making, as described formally by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  In other words, the shift from Newtonian mechanics to string theory shouldn’t be thought of as progress, in the sense that older models are replaced with newer ones.  As Greene and other physicists emphasize, Newton’s calculations haven’t been abandoned; they’ve simply been expanded upon and refined.  His observations and proposals about gravity are still crucial to the enterprise, but they’re incomplete without the also crucial components of relativity, quantum indeterminacy, supersymmetry, and others.

            In addition to the specifics of these various theories, The Elegant Universe is about how different theories fit together.  Thus far, every explanation of the workings of the universe leaves gaps, fissures, aporias of logic.  Take the example of quantum tunneling: the prospect that particles might temporarily “borrow” enough energy to actually penetrate, or “tunnel,” through solid barriers.  Theoretically speaking, it’s not entirely impossible (albeit highly unlikely, since it would require all composite particles to tunnel at the same time) that a tennis ball might pass right through your racket without damaging it.  After tunneling, the particle returns the energy it borrowed—no harm, no foul.  There is no logical framework for how the energy transfer occurs, and Greene compares it to loaning money; it’s established on trust and uncertainty.  Such possibilities seem to conflict with older models, even leading Albert Einstein to say that “God does not play dice with the Universe.”  As physicists worked to introduce quantum mechanics to relativity theory, some inconsistencies were explained; but others were revealed.  Over time, science has remained a process of creative recombination, reconfiguration, and re-narrativization.  To return to Greene’s metaphor, science is comprised of different ways to interpret the text.

            According to literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, Niels Bohr—an important figure in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—was fond of saying that human beings are “suspended in language.”  Like the raw matter of the universe, language can be tested; we can experiment with it, and we can try out various hypotheses concerning its meanings.  It’s sometimes objected that these kinds of arguments are less important than scientific ones, and usually this objection has to do with the relevance of science, or some such.  Yet the experimental trials and tribulations of physics don’t test the ordinary experience of daily life as enjoyed by the vast majority of humanity.  They test a narrow range of experience that nonetheless serves as the foundation for all life—human and nonhuman (as far as we know).  Likewise, the testing of narrative meaning speaks to a narrow range of experimental language; but it’s from the confusions illuminated by these tests that our ordinary language arises.  I find Greene’s comparison of scientific interpretations to literary interpretations compelling because it accounts for the analogous structures of discourse and argument that underlie both fields.  We have a great deal to learn about literature by studying scientific inscription; and we have a great deal to learn about science by studying literary experimentation.