Friday, May 08, 2009
Werner Heisenberg concludes Science and Religion (1927) with this anecdote.
Niels [Bohr] closed the conversation with one of those stories he liked to tell on such occasions: "One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a horseshoe over the door to his house. When a common friend asked him, `But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?' he replied, `Of course not; but they say it works even if you don't believe in it.'"Just like locality and causality. ¶ 11:49 AM
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Yeah, but the version in Zizek's clipboard attributes the horseshoe to Bohr himself, while Heisenberg wrote that Bohr said a mutual acquaintance asked a neighbor in Tisvilde why he'd fixed a horshoe over the door to his house [see Physics and beyond: encounters and conversations, p. 92].
Knowing that Bohr wasn't talking about himself, changes my appreciation of the anecdote and what Bohr intended. And I also reinterpret's Zizek's claim that Bohr is an example of how "fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology" [The Universal Exception, p. 306], as an example of how the manufacture of symbols (the paragdigmatic Bohr) results in an imaginary belief (the horsehoe at Bohr's) about a real event (Bohr telling a story after dinner; if Heisenberg corresponds with the truth).
Zizek's Lacanian interpretation of ideology in quantum mechanics doesn't correspond with the facts. Bohr could be refering to scientists who did not believe quantum mechanics was correct despite the experimental evidence.
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Knowing that Bohr wasn't talking about himself, changes my appreciation of the anecdote and what Bohr intended. And I also reinterpret's Zizek's claim that Bohr is an example of how "fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology" [The Universal Exception, p. 306], as an example of how the manufacture of symbols (the paragdigmatic Bohr) results in an imaginary belief (the horsehoe at Bohr's) about a real event (Bohr telling a story after dinner; if Heisenberg corresponds with the truth).
Zizek's Lacanian interpretation of ideology in quantum mechanics doesn't correspond with the facts. Bohr could be refering to scientists who did not believe quantum mechanics was correct despite the experimental evidence.
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