Bohr And Heisenberg On Quantum Physics — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 20-1):

The founders of quantum mechanics, notably Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, argued that when we talk of atoms, electrons, and so on, we must not fall into the trap of imagining them as little things, existing independently in their own right. …

Heisenberg's own words are revealing in this context:

'In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.'

Bohr expressed it thus:

'Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.'

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, Heisenberg's distinction between 'things' and 'real phenomena', on the one hand, and 'potentialities or possibilities', on the other, is the distinction between instance and potential. It is not so much that elementary particles are any less real than 'any phenomena of daily life', but that the duality of potential and actual (instance) cannot be ignored at quantum scales.

Bohr, however, is concerned here with a different matter. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, this is the view that the science of physics is a semiotic system realised in language ('what we can say'). This is consistent with the immanent view of meaning: that meaning is a property of semiotic systems and does not transcend them.

In short, Heisenberg is concerned with the potential viewpoint in the potential-instance distinction, in physics, whereas Bohr is concerned with the immanence viewpoint in the immanence-transcendence distinction, in epistemology.