Scientific concepts travel widely, but they do not arrive at their destinations intact. As they become semiotic resources for literary, economic, and political projects, they become entangled in new cultural contexts and take on different values—to fascinating effect. Jennifer Burwell's book explores this kind of entanglement as she traces the journey of quantum physics concepts to fields as diverse as literary criticism and new age philosophy.
As she trails these itinerant concepts, Burwell employs analytics and theories of language that may be unusual for readers of this journal. Most importantly, Burwell argues that quantum concepts are nomadic precisely because they cannot be expressed using ordinary language, which she claims derives from sensory experience. Quantum phenomena, for Burwell, are characteristically imprecise and have an oblique relationship to both experience and language. This imprecision, she argues, is productive; because quantum ideas are less embedded in familiar sensory scenarios and defy accurate representation, they are more plastic and liable to appropriation in places far afield. This plasticity also makes them liable to distortion and misapplication, examples of which abound in the book.
In chapter 2, Burwell presents a compelling analysis of the semiotic theories employed by the physicists Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Her analysis highlights key debates among these physicists, namely around concepts of visualizability and intuition. As Burwell deftly demonstrates, these scientific debates had powerful aesthetic debates at their core. These cutting-edge ideas were, she shows, fundamentally animated by classical sensibilities: a quest for timelessness, simplicity, harmony, and unity.
In chapter 3, Burwell looks at the ways in which quantum concepts like the observer effect, superposition, uncertainty, and entanglement have been recruited into literary projects. Burwell criticizes many of these creative interpretive moves, arguing that there is no ‘necessary relationship’ that mobilizes and justifies this metaphorical use of quantum concepts, which lacks fidelity to the original meanings of quantum concepts. Chapter 4 explores how quantum ideas become commodified and serve as ‘material touchstones’ in the world of new age philosophy, mysticism, and get-rich schemes.
Burwell's book is empirically rich but does not offer a robust theoretical approach to the interdiscursive operations at work in the circulation, appropriation, and tropic use of quantum concepts. Nor does it put forth a compelling analysis of how ordinary experience is linked to concept formation and language, relying instead on cognitive models of language that overemphasize denotational precision. The idea that the ambiguous and nonexperiential nature of quantum concepts becomes an affordance for faster or more creative circulation and appropriation is provocative and deserves greater attention. Further, the multiple uses of quantum concepts could be more profitably analyzed, as the author's focus on misapplications assumes that interdiscursive operations need a warrant to be valid. Indeed, the author's argument about the promiscuity of quantum concepts and their unthinkability complicates the idea that they can be applied at all, much less misapplied. Yet, this material deserves more attention and would be productive for scholars working with concepts of interdiscursivity, baptismal events, scientific language, and semiotic ideologies.
