The fact that Carlo Rovelli finishes Helgoland with a few lines pulled from Shakespeare, more than showing his own problem with—yes, even Rovelli is capable of this—confirmation bias, it shows that Shakespeare, long before quantum theory “changed the world,” was almost infinitely more thoughtful and accurate with his “mistaken” understanding of the world.
But don’t take my word for it.
It is a modern conceit that we have advanced from the poetic imaginations of the ancients to clear scientific description, leaving behind the quaint and parochial ways of speaking about the physical world. Poetic imagery, after all, is the kind of language that is the most parochial, most personal, and most dependent on our everyday experience. Its use in writing about physics is not simply a mark of ancient ignorance, nor mere embellishment in popular writing, nor just a sign of the bemused writer’s amazement at the world as physicists know it; rather, those aspects of physics that touch on the fundamental nature of the universe can’t always get squeezed into descriptive terms. This means that the widely shared ideal of describing ultimate reality purely in terms of physics is futile, at least if we mean verbal, not mathematical, description. And if poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude the more personal, parochial, poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality. […]
If we tried to imagine (if we can) a language that avoids all ambiguities, multiplicity of meanings, and ill-defined words, and that insisted on near-perfect links between words and things in the world, this language would seem to be useful for talking only about the empirically most discrete realities. We might use it for talking about physics but not politics, electrons but not ethics, matter but not mind; a descriptive language that faithfully avoids the idols of the marketplace includes “brain” but not “soul,” “useful” but not “virtuous,” “oxytocin” but not “love.”
This point highlights an important caveat. While the issue here is central to the philosophy of language — the study of how words have meaning and how language relates to reality — the underlying concern in the Chandos letter [to Francis Bacon] is less abstract and philosophical. It is the desire, motivated by deep moral seriousness, to find a form of expression that does justice to ideas about ethics, politics, and personal experience, and to think about the limits that a scientific language, tailored to the needs of science, puts on that expression. […]
We should not dismiss that modern science owes at least some of its success to Bacon’s advice to rely as much as possible on clear descriptions and careful definitions, instead of ambiguous poetic images, for expressing what the physical world is like. But a language sufficiently refined for describing the physical realities science seeks to explain is ill suited for expressing human experience. Although this should be a banal observation, it bucks what we are often told today: that science has the final word in all areas of investigation, and all explanations are in theory reducible to descriptions of the physical world. But the language of physics itself, as we will see, is often beyond translation into ordinary language, except in a very rough and poetic sense. And so physics, while sometimes presented as the ideal of scientific description that would overrule the ordinary, parochial, personal accounts of experience, depends for its verbal self-expression on the kind of language — poetic imagery — that we tend to think of as ancient and inferior. […]
The philosopher Nicholas Rescher captures the situation:
“It is instructive to contemplate … the hopeless difficulties encountered nowadays in the popularization of physics — of trying to characterize the implications of quantum theory and relativity theory for cosmology into the subscientific language of everyday life. A classic obiter dictum of Niels Bohr is relevant: “We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” …. Homo sapiens began his quest for knowledge in the realm of poetry. And in the end it seems that in basic respect we are destined to remain close to this starting point.” […]
But there is an additional kind of pretension we should be wary of when talking about physics: the belief that the words of physicists and science writers about what the physical world is like simply are descriptions of the real world. Perhaps these words are decorated here and there with a helpful metaphor or analogy to get difficult concepts across; but, that poetry aside, we often think these descriptions neatly map onto the world and thus present a clear and illusion-free view of reality. It is a belief that is easily derived from a way of thinking about scientific language as the ideal of true understanding, and about words as unambiguously linked to things and processes. That ideal doesn’t seem to apply well to the physics of fundamental material reality. At best, popular physics texts are approximate renderings of the meanings and implications of mathematical models and theories. (And what the mathematics precisely mean, and how they do or don’t describe the world, is yet another set of complications that popular science writing routinely ignores even though they have long been subjects of philosophical fisticuffs.)
All this is more than a general lesson about intellectual humility; it is also a lesson about the folly of thinking that the language of physics is the only one that discloses ultimate truth about the world. Reflecting on the difficulties involved in speaking about fundamental physics suggests that, however useful to science the ideal of clearly defined descriptive terms is, in the end we still have to rely on language that is closer to our everyday ways of speaking — rich in imprecise words, in poetic images and rough analogies, metaphors and gestures. […]
For physics texts, the fate of the monolingual applies to two kinds of people. On the one hand is the consumer of popular physics texts who doesn’t know mathematical physics and thus fails to see what’s lost in translation. On the other hand is the person [the philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark] actually has in mind, the believer in scientism: The fate of the monolingual “seems to be befalling recent scienticists [adherents of scientism], who think that nothing which is excluded from ‘scientific language’ can be real.” […]
The authority of physics is entirely justified for the kinds of explanations and powers it affords. But the idea that the language of physics alone speaks the ultimate truth about the world, dispelling the illusions produced by our everyday experience, for instance of space and time, or of consciousness, seems difficult to defend when that language itself depends on ways of speaking that belong fully to everyday experience. Talk of illusions is surely overrated and often no more than sensationalistic silliness. It would be wiser to say that the physical world, whatever it is like when expressed in the full complexity of mathematical physics, is unlike what it seems to us. And that is the point: The physical world isn’t like that to us, which means that if it matters that we understand human experience as fully as we might, including how we shape our personal, moral, and political lives, then the hope that mathematical physics alone discloses ultimate reality is misguided. This is so even while — and this is no small thing — physics offers one of the richest opportunities for wonder, to which the most deeply human response, besides seeking to understand, may well be either poetry or silent awe.
In this humble individual’s view, Rovelli should practice more silent awe.