It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and persiflage. But while his book is as demanding a read as anything published this year, it still leaves you smiling. Over and over again the author reminds you of the shimmering weirdness beneath the experiential surface of what we are pleased to call the real world.
There is no shortage of books that pit one thinker against another to tell the history of an argument. Keynes and Hayek, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Camus and Sartre: the shelves warp with accounts of heavyweight dialectic duels. Egginton, though, has a rather different story to tell. His brainboxes never met. Kant died almost a century before Borges and Heisenberg were born, and nobody, not even Heisenberg, ever suggested that time travel into the past is a possibility, though his great rival Einstein thought we might one day be able to travel into the future.
But even had they got to talking, there wouldn’t have been much arguing. Philosopher, physicist and fabulist were united by their independent realisations that the world as it is in itself is not the world as apprehended through our senses, because those senses, as Kant pointed out, have their limitations. We can’t, for instance, see radio waves or X-rays, or even hear the whistles that dogs respond to. What else might we be missing out on? It doesn’t, of course, follow that there are ghosts or gods out there. But nor does it follow that there aren’t. We simply can’t say. Man is not – and can never be – the measure of all things.
Heisenberg proved this with what came to be called the Uncertainty Principle. In experiment after experiment he showed that at the atomic level we can’t have absolute knowledge of a particle’s behaviour. We can pinpoint its position, but once done we have no way of knowing its momentum. Or we can track its momentum, but then we can’t say where it is. As with space and speed, so with energy and time: isolate one and you have no handle on the other.
And just to make matters more difficult, Heisenberg then worked out that the pairs of readings you end up with from such experiments are non-commutable. At school we were taught that 7×9 = 9×7, etc. But multiply an electron’s momentum by its position and you get one figure – while multiplying its position by its momentum gets you… a different figure. As Heisenberg put it, in words that pretty much echo Kant’s description of the limits of our sensory apprehension: ‘What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’
If all this sounds a little Alice in Wonderland then bear in mind what Heisenberg’s friend-rival Niels Bohr said about the quantum world:
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. [Like the quantum physicist] the poet… is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
What was that about Stem subjects being more practical than History and English?
Which brings us to Jorge Luis Borges. His metafictional jaunts through memory and dream don’t so much illustrate as embody Kant’s and Heisenberg’s insights into time and space. As Egginton never quite says, there is no simpler way of grasping their eternally unsettling realisation that the empirical world doesn’t – cannot – exist independent of our efforts to perceive it than to read Borges’s Fictions.
Borges was obsessed with paradox, with situations in which, as Egginton writes of Einstein: ‘Both options seemed at once absolutely necessary and utterly impossible.’ Start with the short story ‘Funes the Memorious’, whose titular hero is perpetually remembering everything that has ever happened – which means that he cannot but live outside of time. Then try ‘The Aleph’, about a small globe that contains, well, everything – up to and including ‘the inconceivable universe’. Yes, it’s all a bit 1960s – but, as Egginton makes clear, so are Kantian idealism and atomic physics.
Egginton isn’t faultless. There is no doubting how heartfelt the Decker Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins is about dismissing the determinism that so many scientists are agreed upon. But his trashing of the arguments of, say, Sam Harris – significantly, the only times in the book when he stoops to lawyerly rhetorical irony – are as self-regarding and slippery as anything in Harris’s Free Will. At one point Egginton quotes Angelo Bassi, an Italian scientist who has a Wittgensteinesque mistrust of metaphor while ‘strongly believing that physics is words’. The same goes double for books by moonlighting literature dons. The Rigor of Angels is a marvellous eye-widening read. But somewhere along the way, Egginton has forgotten the counsel of that wisest of men, Richard Feynman: ‘Anyone who thinks they understand quantum physics doesn’t understand quantum physics.’
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