The Principle

by Jérôme Ferrari

In those dreams, made all the more terrible by the gray light of dawn, he never saw his mother, nor the familiar figures from his childhood.

  On high blackboards, in a vast deserted amphitheater, he would watch with terror as equations he should have understood and which he knew he would never see again were erased, and however hard he tried to imprint them on his mind, all that remained of them was the vague memory of silent signs sucked back into nothingness, as if a perverse God had yielded him the secrets of his omniscience only for the pleasure of taking them away from him forever.

  From the stony mouths of stern masters fell nonsensical maxims he didn’t want to hear, in all the languages of the world.

  Long golden cobras slithered in the dust, in the shimmering starlight, and he watched the fruit rot on the branches of the tree of knowledge.

  Early in the afternoon, he would join you at the University, where you’d arrived early in the morning while he was still moaning in his bed. He would greet you with nonchalant affection, trailing in his wake the odor of alcohol and tobacco and fallen women, all those things that only existed for you in their evanescent form as scents. You were such an utterly wholesome young man, a boy scout eager for fresh air and honest camaraderie, so full of enthusiasm and innocence that you imagined you and your friends in the youth movement were working to bring about a better world, as if hiking, gathering around the campfire in manly and ascetic good humor, and leading a clean and spotless life were enough to redeem the world. You also loved everything that’s alien to me, everything I don’t understand, and that should have been enough for me to hate you, even though the young man I’m forced to recognize as myself still doesn’t know, on this day in June 1989, the extent of the humiliation he will soon suffer because of you, while he’s still waiting to be called to take his final end-of-year oral exam.

  I’ve just heard that I’ll have to comment on a passage from Physics and Philosophy, which of course I haven’t read, occupied as I’ve been in indefinitely prolonging my adolescent crisis, overdosing on English cold wave music and incense. There in front of me is your book, whose cover illustration, so drastically ugly it could only have been premeditated, depicts a horrible orange polygon on a black background, as if the publishers, fearing that quantum mechanics wasn’t sufficiently off-putting in itself, had tried to discourage hypothetical buyers by every means possible, even the most underhand—unless they considered ugliness an unquestionable guarantee of scientific seriousness. I hear the candidate before me babble laboriously on, I see his quivering back, his bent neck, and, facing him, the young female assistant professor listening with a slightly tense smile and tapping her fingertips mechanically on the table. I think she’s beautiful, and I now regret not having set foot all year in the classes she devoted to you, but I’m not thinking about you, I’m probably being stupid, indulging in vague erotic fantasies, and I’m not scared. I’ve learned to comment on texts I haven’t read and don’t understand, when it comes down to it that may even be the one indisputable skill I’ve acquired after four years of study. A few popular articles, the right methodological jargon, and my own brazen arrogance have so far allowed me to successfully conceal my laziness. So I know that you were responsible for the uncertainty principle, which stipulates, apparently, that it’s impossible to determine simultaneously the position and speed of an elementary particle, and I also know that, in the controversy which for a long time divided physicists in the 1920s, for reasons that escape me as totally as they bore me, you, along with Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, were an opponent of Einstein, Schrödinger, and the Prince de Broglie—and this meager baggage seems to be quite sufficient to confront the young assistant professor, who’s now signaling to me to join her. I advance with the unmistakable smugness of ignorance because, basically, I don’t know a thing, I don’t know you, I don’t want to join you on a desolate island, you’re still nothing to me but one more German name on an endless list of German names, I know nothing of the joys and sorrows of the life of the mind, I carefully chop up texts into sections and subsections, like cuts of meat, until nothing is left alive, I don’t know your unforgettable moments of grace, looking at the North Sea, and I don’t know that the unforgettable moments of grace don’t solve everything.

  No sooner is it glimpsed than the light disappears.

  And yet, when you submitted the results of your calculations on Heligoland to Pauli, he didn’t greet them as the ravings of a fool, and even deigned to find them “interesting,” which, coming from someone who described Einstein’s propositions as “not completely stupid,” could only be interpreted as a remarkable display of enthusiasm. You were convinced you’d just taken a crucial step on the only road that was still open, the only one leading out of the terrible labyrinth in which you’d all been wandering so sadly for so many years. All you had to do was give up insoluble questions, those that revolved around a physical reality that nobody could observe or conceive, forget all those stories of waves and corpuscles, orbits and trajectories, free yourself painfully from your nostalgia for images, and take one giant leap across the abyss and into the refuge of mathematical forms, because it’s there that reason has always had its home—and it was once again the summer night in the courtyard of Prunn Castle, with the notes of the chaconne rising from a solo violin and snatching you from your pain by revealing that the world wasn’t just the chaos it seemed to be, that great broken body, with its pointless deaths, its lost souls, its vain hopes, its ruins, its indistinguishable resentment and anger, the humiliation of its diktats, and that it was still possible to have faith in what you didn’t call God but a central order, within which everything had its place. Yes, you’d found the right way, the only way, that much was certain, and for a moment, I suppose, you had no doubt that you would convince the community of physicists.

  But of course, nothing happened the way you wanted it to.

  When you explained the peculiarities of your matrix mechanics to Einstein, he accused you, not entirely unreasonably, of leading physics into a dangerous terrain by abandoning the ideal that had always been his, the objective description of nature. Then, a little later that same year, 1926, Erwin Schrödinger put forward a hypothesis that expressed an unreasonable hope and must have appeared to you a terrible step backwards: that electrons had never been particles but, quite simply, waves, which sometimes looked falsely like particles. In support of his statements, and in order to describe the evolution of these waves of matter, Schrödinger proposed a magnificent differential equation that took account of the experimental results as well as your stern matrices, but in an infinitely simpler and more familiar manner. In doing so, he aroused the enthusiasm of a scientific community delighted, after years of wandering in a quantum storm, to at last see again the shores of the paradise that a jealous God had taken away from it. The professor you admired so much, Arnold Sommerfeld, also seemed ready to succumb to the baleful siren song of these waves, and no matter how strongly you objected that Schrödinger’s theory, seductive as it was, contradicted known facts, nobody listened to you, everything would soon be resolved, it was all perfectly obvious, you were even openly suspected of harboring some nasty grudges, you were focusing on unimportant details out of pure jealousy, vexed at having to renounce your quantum ravings. Nobody is free of pretty resentments, and it’s quite possible you were indeed suffering from wounded pride, but what motivated you before anything else was the belief that it was necessary to renounce forever the intuitive representations of atomic phenomena, however painful that might be: Schrödinger and all the others were wrong, they were embracing the futile pipe dreams that desire and nostalgia rendered irresistible to them, nothing more, but, without knowing it, they were still wandering in a labyrinth full of monsters, on the borders of a savage land, a hostile land they would have to tame because it wouldn’t let them escape, and never again would they find their lost paradise.

  POSITION 3:

  IN THE CLOUD CHAMBER

 
The elements of the problem are simple and depressing: in a Wilson chamber, we can visualize the trajectory of electrons in the form of condensed droplets in the fog; but whatever the theoretical framework chosen, yours or Schrödinger’s, it’s impossible to suppose that the electrons do indeed follow a trajectory without falling into terrible contradictions.

  We are thus seeing something that clearly exists even though it ought not to.

  The others were all wrong, you knew that, and Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli knew it too, but the merciless cloud chamber deprived you of the luxury of believing that you’d solved everything and that you were just a poor misunderstood genius. Oh, no, the unforgettable moments of grace don’t solve everything, and every advance gives rise to a new disappointment, even crueler than the previous ones. You could only counter an incomplete theory with another theory just as incomplete. You could merely denounce mistakes you didn’t have the means to correct by joining Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where he’d invited Schrödinger in order to impress upon him that, in spite of the considerable mathematical progress represented by his wave function, nothing was settled at the level of physical reality—and in fact he spent days on end trying in vain to make him see that, without giving him a moment’s respite. He’d installed him in his own home, in order to make sure that he wouldn’t run away, and to torment him as much as he liked: as soon as morning came, he would stand in the doorway of the poor man’s room and inform him of the objections he’d come up with during the night; at the breakfast table, he would drive him into a corner with the fierce stubbornness of a fanatic; through the door of the bathroom, he would continue to assert, and implore Schrödinger to accept at last, that the electron, while it might manifest some of the behavior of a wave, could in no way be considered merely as a wave; all day long, he would pursue him from the living room to the study, he would pursue him even into his dreams—so much so that Schrödinger, after regretting bitterly, as seems to have been the rule at the time, that he’d ever made the stupid decision to study physics, had no other way out than to fall ill in order to escape his tormentor. This wasn’t much help, because Niels Bohr now laid siege to his sickbed, grabbing him by the lapels of his pajamas and dragging him from his soft slumbers with such inflexible stubbornness that he must have made the prospect of death seem ever more delightful. And when Schrödinger managed to flee his Danish jail, it was you that Bohr now undertook to torment systematically. He would ask you incessant questions, hovering over you like a bird of prey, in a sickening haze of tobacco; he would twist the problems in all directions, grimacing like a man possessed, until they became totally incomprehensible; he would exasperate you, stop you from sleeping, stop you from thinking, until you couldn’t bear it anymore and you burst into sobs at three in the morning and begged him to leave you in peace. You welcomed his decision to go on a skiing trip to Norway as an unexpected liberation: it can’t be ruled out that you furtively hoped he would break a leg, or even both legs, immediately reproaching yourself for your hardness of heart, because you loved him like a father. But it’s necessary to get away from one’s father figures in order to be alone and helpless in front of Wilson’s cloud chamber, orphaned eyes fixed on a trajectory that shouldn’t exist.

  It was there that you returned endlessly, it was impossible to escape, the unpalatable taste of reality made you nauseous, and even the thought that, from that point of view, Schrödinger, with his stupid waves, was no more capable than you were of explaining such a simple phenomenon, was no consolation.

  But in Bohr’s absence, God remembered that he was merciful and let you look over his shoulder once again. And you understood.

  In the cloud chamber, the trajectory of an electron could not be observed, and had in truth never been observed. All that could be seen were the particular tracks of drops of condensation, nothing more, and it was the human mind that, victim of a routine that was several thousand years old, connected these tracks into an illusion of a continuous trajectory, just as children carefully join the numbered dots in their drawing books until witches, dragons, and other imaginary figures appear.

  You still needed to learn how to look beyond the obvious, to strip yourself of all the habits keeping you captive: somewhere, lost in the cosmic immensity of the droplet, was the electron. It was impossible to say where it was exactly. A little farther on, it again indicated its approximate position but when it came down to it, there was no reason to think that it was the same object leaving traces of its passing in the fog. There was nothing but a sequence of singular events, flashes of fleeting existences lighting up the darkness and then going out again. And that was all. You had seen. There was nothing more to see. No permanence. No continuity. No trajectory—just an army of bloodless ghosts crossing Wilson’s chamber at an indeterminate speed, taking vague shape and leaving the imprint of their blurred contours in the mist.

  And that’s the principle.

  But I, decades later, can only repeat: according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in quantum physics it’s impossible to determine simultaneously the position and speed of an elementary particle, and I know that things are going very badly, the young assistant professor has stopped smiling completely, the tips of her long fingers hit the table at an accelerated pace in time with her exasperation, the thin lines at the corners of her eyelids plunge me back, at the least appropriate moment, into erotic images from which the terror I’m starting to feel is unable to rescue me. She sighs and slowly passes her hands over her face. I find nothing better to do than to notice that she isn’t wearing a wedding ring, at the very moment I know I’m done for, I’d have been certain of that even if her anger didn’t tell me that, in all probability, I’m talking complete nonsense, because your publishers have screwed up the production of your book to such an extent that it isn’t only hideously ugly but impossible to handle, as I’ve just experienced; during my short analysis, the binding has snapped and the pages have shamelessly fallen out and spread across the desk, providing irrefutable proof that the work from which they’ve just dissociated themselves hasn’t been opened before today. She gestures for me to be quiet, she’s tired of me serving up this stale old dish, a dish I may know perfectly well how to concoct, she’s prepared to acknowledge that, because what I’m saying isn’t even bad, isn’t even false, just the same old tasteless positivist stew she’s been served so many times she’s sick of it, I’m turning what’s actually a terrible verdict of dissolution into a vague precept about the limits of knowledge, and she keeps condemning me, she won’t stop until I myself have dissolved into the blinding clarity of a luminous fog. I’d like to be at home, in my room, lying next to the girl who comes to join me after I’ve sent my mother out for a walk or to do the shopping, making her promise not to come back too early, which she accepts every time, quite happy to remain the backstage organizer of my sex life, with an amused, complicit smile that makes me ashamed, I’m ashamed now, I feel sick to my stomach, I’d like to be far from you again, as I’ve always been.

  I’m so far from you.

  I don’t know you, I don’t know Bavaria, the Alpine peaks in the winter sun, or the castle of the Prince of Denmark on the shore of the gray sea, nature scares me, it disgusts me, and when I listen to the partita for solo violin, I don’t hear the call of any central order but merely the strains of an inconsolable sorrow, as if life, with all its profound, pointless strength, were mourning its own fragility. I’m far from your struggles, from your exhaustion, far from the sobs that Niels Bohr, as soon as he returns from Norway, again provokes in the night with his questions, his cruel objections, that sadistic intransigence of his in wanting to understand the principle you’ve just discovered, refusing to give you any rest until you’ve fully understood it yourself and formulated it in the language of men.

  I’m far from your sleepless nights, from your bursts of hatred, and the sincerity of your remorse when you wrote to Niels Bohr asking him to forgive you for your childish recal
citrance, the weakness of your frayed nerves, and above all your ingratitude, because you love him like a father who, ever since your first encounter in Göttingen, has never stopped teaching you, no, more than that, who’s never stopped showing you what thinking is, and, without him, you would never have known that thinking has nothing to do with calculations, logic, or crosswords, but that it’s actually a magic spell of speed and power, of cruelty, pain, and ecstasy, the open wound we’re determined to make deeper.

  I find it hard to understand what thinking means, I find it hard to understand even the language of men beyond which the principle extends, but since it’s in the language of men that it must be expressed, let’s put it this way: the speed and position of an elementary particle are linked in such a way that any precision in measuring one entails a proportionate and perfectly quantifiable indeterminacy in measuring the other.

  If we choose to determine the position exactly, our ignorance of the speed becomes literally infinite—which doesn’t mean that this speed exists and we don’t know it, but rather that the concept of speed has lost any precise meaning.

  If we determine the speed, it’s the position that becomes hazy, as if the electron were stretching out in space, filling the whole of it, down to its smallest recesses.

  Speed and position are therefore mere virtualities, which only acquire a modicum of objective reality at the moment of measurement, and never together.

  But what the language of men expresses so clumsily can be grasped all at once in an equation of such concision and simplicity as to conceal its poisonous nature. Because well before it took the form of mathematical inequalities, to which it owes its incomparable beauty, the principle first consisted of your belief that we will never get to the core of things, not because of a curse or the weakness of our faculties, but for the radical, conclusive reason the young assistant professor reveals just before she dismisses me, leaning toward me across the table that protects me from her rage and indignation: because things have no core.