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Quantum Physics Is Using The Wrong Language.
“In Benjamin Lee Whorf’s excellent book, Thought and Reality, that I strongly recommend, the Hopi language is analysed in fascinating details. For one thing, Hopi has no tenses as we know them, because the Hopi view of life doesn’t fraction time into units the way we do. Instead of minutes ticking away, picture the minutes being strung so that every “present” moment is a string of all the minutes that have passed already. Whorf explains that the Hopi language permits a better understanding of quantum physics than European languages do. Think about it: traditional science was born from the view of the world imposed by European languages, binary and fragmented. Quantum physics challenge our minds because we’re not used to conceive of something being both wave and particle at the same time. Hopi accommodates such apparent paradoxes and is in many other ways suited to alternative scientific approaches.”
The above passage is from an article by Joumana Medlej. I learned a bit about Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic relativity today thanks to the above article and this great lecture from John Sweeney
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Painting by Michael Rubin
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Actually, the right language for quantum mechanics is clearly mathematics. No one really understands QM if they haven't understood it in its characteristic expression, i.e., the equations that make it up.For example, it's really misleading to suggest that an electron (or anything else) is "both wave and particle at the same time." An electron isn't a particle or a wave, ever. It's an entity that happens to obey the Schroedinger equation and some other stuff, and when we try to translate it into English, we might say, suggests some particle-like qualities (mass, momentum) and some wave-like qualities (wavelength). But there's no true "paradox" there, even if it's counterintuitive and surprising.
Moreover, if a language had no concept of discrete moments of time, it would be very difficult to express QM in that language. The equation Schroedinger came up with is used to solve for the state of a given system at some specific time (excepting systems in a stationary state). Some other expressions of the Schroedinger equation treat time in different ways, but it seems doubtful to me from what you've said that translating those equations into Hopi would make any more sense than it would with the original one. And anyway, again, the way to actually understand them is not to translate them into some other language. The way to understand is to deal with the equations themselves.
Very good comment David, it is much appreciated. Seeing as I know next to nothing about Quantum Physics, what you're saying seems right on to me, but also seems to jive with Whorf's ideas in a very real way. One of Whorf's famous assertions is that language influences thought, and in many cases, forces us into a certain "mode" of thinking. One of the ways to break out of this prison, according to Whorf, is to learn as many languages as possible. I very much see mathematics as another language in itself. So it only follows that the best way to understand QM is to use it's native tongue, otherwise there is bound to be lots of stuff getting lost in translation.
Fair enough. I think an interesting question could be, what language might be helpful for physicists. That is, no matter what we might say about mathematics as a language, its nobody's *first* language, and so it does seem to me that physicists have to do a lot of work to overcome limitations that exist in English/German/etc. Now, as clearly indicated by the fact that physics seems so *weird* when you try to express it in English, they do manage to overcome some of these limitations thanks to creativity, training, and the power of experiment and mathematics. But what might a Hopi physicist (who also trained in mathematics) be able to see more easily? I don't know. I'm not convinced of strict linguistic determinism (I really do think the existence of modern physics provides a nice refutation), but I do think these things clearly play a role in shaping our thinking.