So, I'm thinking maybe something along the lines of "Reading Subatomically: Toward a Quantum Literary Criticism." Too pretentious? Of course it is! I'm still working on digging up the (probably enormous amount of) literary criticism that (already) deals with what I'm attempting to articulate.
Hey--if we can do it with Darwin, we can do it with Einstein. And Everett. And Schrodinger and Heisenberg. And so on.
In the meantime, some more ruminations (from this morning):
The "participant observer" notion (which Professor Bartine connected to my last transmission) is indeed integral to quantum physics (so far as I understand it after two weeks of reading about it). The assumption Everett most notably sought to address was that of Bohr and other proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation, which, among other things, accounted for the oddly potential "superposition" of subatomic particles by suggesting that they "collapse" into one of their possible states only at the moment in which they are measured (observed). Everett notes a lecture he attended in which Einstein expressed his doubts about this interpretation by saying that he wasn't inclined to believe a kitten could change the workings of the universe simply by looking at it.
There is a strange thing going on with this issue of the observer. In classical physics, is was generally assumed, of course, that the observer was passive, disinterested, and had no active role in "what happened" amongst and between the things he was observing. Then the Copenhagen folks come along and say that the observer is in fact in a direct causal relationship with the measured behavior of that which is being observed (though only, that is, on the subatomic, quantum level). Then we have Einstein's relativity and Everett's many-worlds, both of which suggest (in different ways) that the observer's perspective is undoubtedly a factor, but only within an "objective" system of laws. In other words, the universe follows certain laws, but these are in fact laws of probability, certain only insofar as they are uncertain, which leaves the observer both subjected to them and, in some strange way, unable to observe them. So I'm still not sure if quantum theory on the whole asserts that nature is a construct and completely a matter of subjective interpretation, or if it is systematic in a way we simply cannot understand, or if it is somehow relatively objective and objectively relative.
At any rate, there are some issues here I find worth pursuing. I'm presently halfway through a book called Other Worlds by Paul Davies, which is essentially an attempt to put all of this stuff into layman's terms. I'm intrigued by the potential for a kind of literary criticism here--sort of reading literature subatomically. Most (though not all) of the criticism I'm finding that tries to incorporate physics in any way is basically attuned to issues/themes of "the bomb," which is not what engages me here. Again, while the postmodern issue of "doubling" is indeed a possible path, I'm more interested in the issues arising out of things like Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle--specifically in how they have the potential to recast our perceptions/assumptions about time, not just in a quantum physical sense, but in a historical and bodily sense (Everett would figure heavily into this as well). I'm not sure what would come of it, but I think it would be interesting to put these quantum interpretations in direct conversation with more familiar literary ideas such as Keats' negative capability (particularly with regard to Heisenberg, and also to the discovery of the subatomic particle's ability to maintain a "negative energy") and, more pointedly, Foucault's conceptions of time, history, and the event, and the body's place within these. And hey, why not some Heidegger, too?
