By Steven French
Introduction
In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published the paper containing his eponymous equation, one of the most significant scientific achievements of the twentieth century. In the same year Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, dedicated to what he insisted at the time on calling ‘scientifiction’. Given this, an obvious question to ask is whether the new theory of quantum mechanics had any impact on this emerging genre of literature, and if so, in what form?[1] As far as I can tell, however, no one has seriously considered this before now.[2] That’s not to say that there are no studies of the impact of quantum physics on science fiction at all – there are, but they tend to focus on later, post-war, developments. My interest lies with the earlier years, stretching from the late 1920s into the 1940s, when the theory spread beyond a small set of theoretical physicists and not only began to be applied to a range of phenomena – physical, chemical and biological – but was also presented to the general public through a number of popular scientific texts.
Unfortunately, however, with one or two exceptions, it appears to have had little impact on the science fiction stories of that era, beyond the occasional name-dropping and the odd, usually distorted, reference. it might be thought that this was because quantum mechanics was too new a theory and had not yet filtered into the consciousness of the general public, even of those who might be taken to be attuned to the latest scientific advances. Yet, this situation appears to contrast sharply with another form of literature prevalent at the time, namely Modernism. There is now a burgeoning literature on how the likes of Virginia Woolf were receptive to the new quantum physics, drawing on it to give non-traditional shape to their works. That suggests that the early authors of ‘scientifiction’ were not quite as ‘on the ball’ scientifically speaking as certain avant-garde writers in the UK. As we’ll see, however, things are not quite so clear, although there remains enough of a disparity to demand some form of explanation.
The History and Philosophy of Quantum Physics
The body of fundamental theoretical work that is now labelled ‘quantum mechanics’ initially developed along two, apparently different, paths, each a response to the difficulties faced by the ‘old’ quantum theory of Max Planck and Niels Bohr. It was the former who introduced ‘quanta’ of energy in order to account for the characteristics of electromagnetic radiation but it was Einstein who embodied them in the form of photons in his 1905 explanation of the ’photoelectric effect’, for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize (Kuhn 1978). Bohr, in turn, used this device to explain atomic spectra, offering a model in which electrons were set in certain orbits around a central nucleus, ‘jumping’ between them by absorbing or emitting these chunks of energy.
This model remained highly successful for the next decade or so but by the early 1920s it had begun to fray at the seams in the face of new empirical evidence. In response, Werner Heisenberg took the extreme step of abandoning talk of electron ‘orbits’ entirely and insisted that systems should be represented via observable quantities only (such as the frequencies and intensities of atomic spectra). The set of equations that he came up with seemed bizarre, however, until his colleague Max Born realised that they could be re-formulated in terms of a mathematical array known as a matrix. It was in the context of this ‘matrix mechanics’ that Heisenberg derived his famous Uncertainty Principle, which states that in the case of certain such observables (known as ‘non-commuting’, in that it matters which one is measured first), such as position and momentum, or energy and time, one can measure precisely either one or the other, but not both. This was subsequently appropriated by Bohr to formally underpin his philosophy of ‘complementarity’ which has baffled physicists and philosophers ever since but which, broadly speaking, takes measurements of quantum systems to reveal complementary aspects of their behaviour.
Around the same time, Schrödinger presented what appeared to be an entirely different approach, that came to be called ‘wave mechanics’ and which eschewed quantum jumps between electron orbits in favour of, as the name suggests, a wave-based understanding of the absorption and emission of radiation. However, as Einstein quickly pointed out, these ‘waves’ could not be regarded as real once systems with more than one electron were considered and it was Born, again, who supplied what became the accepted understanding of them in terms of the probability of obtaining a certain outcome in a measurement. Although opposed to both matrix mechanics and Bohr’s understanding of it, Schrödinger nevertheless appreciated that his formulation and Heisenberg’s were physically equivalent, a realisation that was subsequently put on a secure mathematical footing in 1932 by John (Janos) von Neumann, yielding the standard formalism still in play today.
By this point, the early 1930s, quantum mechanics was being applied to a diverse range of phenomena, from radioactive decay to the formation of molecular bonds and was, as a result, setting down a record of astonishing empirical success. Nevertheless, issues remained. Both Einstein and Schrödinger remained opposed to the emerging consensus around Bohr’s vision of the theory (which came to be known in the 1950s as the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’). Thus, Einstein maintained that something was missing from the theory and together with his collaborators proposed a famous thought experiment that came to be seen as expressing a significant and non-classical feature of quantum physics, previously articulated by Schrödinger as a kind of mysterious ‘entanglement’ between particles (Maudlin 2019). This ‘spooky action-at-a-distance’ has since been experimentally verified and its possible applications in quantum computation and communications are now under active investigation.
Schrödinger also presented his own thought experiment, featuring his now infamous cat. This was his attempt to push back against Bohr’s insistence that although microscopic systems could be represented within the framework of quantum mechanics, the macroscopic set-up used to observe them had to be described in classical terms in order for the results to be communicable. Schrödinger imagined a box containing an arrangement that would lead to the death of the cat if a piece of radioactive material decayed and not otherwise. According to the theory, that material must be described as in a superposition of decayed and not-decayed states, with a certain probability assigned to the realisation of each. But the theory also mandates that if another system interacts with that material, then the joint system also has to be described in terms of a superposition and so on, up the chain of interactions, until the cat is also included. As far as Schrödinger was concerned, what this showed was that, contrary to what Bohr maintained, the theory can embrace macroscopic situations and indeed, by the mid-1930s it had started to be used to explain the weird behaviour of liquid helium and superconducting materials. More importantly, subsequent commentators understood this thought experiment as exemplifying an issue that has come to be known as ‘the Measurement Problem’.[3]
In a nutshell, the problem is this: when the box is opened, it is always either a live (hopefully) or dead cat that is observed, never a superposition, so the question arises: what accounts for the ‘collapse’ of the superposition into a definite state? An early suggestion was that this is due to the act of observation itself and this is often presented as a central tenet of the Copenhagen Interpretation. In fact, it was vehemently rejected by Bohr and it was another physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Wigner, who actively promoted it. Despite the popularisation of this suggestion in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was widely rejected by both physicists and philosophers of physics on the grounds that it remained mysterious how, exactly, an act of observation (by whom? or what?!) could generate such a shift.
Subsequently, several alternative solutions to the Measurement Problem became available (see French and Saatsi 2020). One of the most well-known is the so-called ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’, originally proposed by Hugh Everett in 1956 (albeit not with that name). On this view, the superposition is understood to encode the different outcomes which are located in alternative ‘branches’ or, as they came to be called, ‘worlds’ of the multiverse. So, in one such branch, the observer opens the box and sees a live cat and in another, her counterpart opens it and observes a dead one. It is this understanding of quantum mechanics that is most prominently featured in recent science-fiction narratives, although, sadly perhaps, the theory itself blocks any such observer from hopping between these worlds (perhaps the best account of this interpretation is Wallace 2012).
Quantum Physics in Early Science-Fiction
With the caveat that I have not sampled every issue of every Anglophone magazine, most mentions of the term ‘quantum’ refer only to the ‘old’ quantum theory of Planck and Bohr. A representative example would be Victor Rousseau’s ‘The Atom-Smasher’ (May 1930) in which the ‘key’ to unlocking the power of the atom is said to be ‘[t]he Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously but only by a certain finite amount, or multiples of this amount …’ (Rousseau 1930, p. 236). Despite this, the story itself makes little scientific sense, as the ‘atom smasher’ of the title works on the principle of a ‘wave series of a single sound extended in time to make four-dimensional action (p. 241) which allows the user to travel through time, something that was ‘theoretically implied since the discoveries of Einstein …’ (p. 243). Arthur Eddington, who confirmed Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with his famous eclipse observations, is also mentioned, as emphasising the ‘stupendous’ amount of energy ‘locked up’ in an atom (p. 235).
Leaving out those stories that similarly refer to ‘unlocking’ the power of the atom, typically in the context of producing some sort of weapon,[4] the obvious analogy between the Bohr model of the atom and the solar system formed the basis of numerous speculations about civilisations existing in the sub-atomic realm. An early example is Ray Cummings’ ‘The Girl in the Golden Atom’ (1919) in which a chemist uses a powerful microscope to observe a ‘universe in an atom’ (Cummings 1970, p. 176). Again, however, the story is scientifically nonsensical, despite Cummings’ claims to have a background in physics (claims that turned out to be vastly exaggerated; see Mullen 1999).
A better attempt can be found in R.F. Starzl’s parody of Cummings’ story, ‘Out of the Sub-Universe’ (1928), in which ‘cosmic’ rays (discovered in 1912 with the term itself coined by Robert Millikan only in the 1920s) are used to shrink the intrepid explorers to sub-atomic dimensions, whereupon they discover that time, as measured by the revolutions of the electron around the nucleus, passes more quickly. In his editorial comment Hugo Gernsback insisted that the story contains ‘excellent science, and will make you understand a great deal about the atomic world, if you do not know it already’ (1928, p. 378).
Similarly, in ‘The Pygmy Planet’ (1932) Jack Williamson suggests that certain frequencies of x-rays, ‘so powerful that they are almost akin to the cosmic ray’ (1932a, p. 155), can cause the orbits of electrons to collapse, shrinking the atoms and anything composed of them (and again there is an explicit comparison with the solar system; p. 155). Time again moves faster in these new worlds and interestingly, in response to readers’ concerns about the science behind his story, Williamson explains that given the word limit, he couldn’t include all the ‘technical details’, particularly with regard to how gravity would work in this microscopic domain (Williamson 1932b, pp. 279-280). Unfortunately, however, he then gets these details completely wrong, taking gravity to be a kind of field which exerts a pressure, with gravitational attraction resulting from material objects shielding each other from this pressure. Williamson here draws on the work of Alvin J. Powers, who rejected Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which conceives gravity, not as an attractive force, acting ‘at a distance’ as Newton maintained, but as the effect of the curvature of space-time, itself distorted by the presence of massive bodies. In neither theory is it understood as exerting some kind of ‘pressure’. As to how gravity ‘works’ at the atomic level, that remains an ongoing programme of research.[5]
Shifting to the other end of the length scale, G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s ‘The Man From the Atom’ (1923) has the hero increasing in size, through a reversal of sub-atomic division, to the point where he becomes larger than, first, the Earth, then the solar system and then even nebulae of stars. Eventually, these also merge into a great ball and, flipping the above analogy, Wertenbaker (then only fifteen) speculates that there could be ‘huge’ electrons composed of universes. Splitting electrons also feature in ‘The Marble Virgin’ by Kennie McDowd (1929) in which an ‘electron dissolver’ is used to render the particles ‘… into infinitely minute nothings of heat and light-flash.’ With atoms again envisaged as planetary systems, by changing the number of electrons they contain in this way, different elements are obtained and so a weird form of transmutation is achieved. 
Further suggestive references can be found in the likes of Edward Sears’ ‘The Atomic Riddle’ (1928) which refers to ‘… the modern idea of light [as] composed of bundles of energy’ (p. 51), that is, quanta. The photon is also mentioned in ‘Minus Planet’ by J.D. Clark (1937), generally regarded as the first story about anti-matter. Clark, who was a chemist and rocket scientist, does at least get the science broadly right, although little thought is given to the consequences of using the Moon to annihilate an approaching planet made of anti-matter!
R. S. Richardson, an astronomer who wrote science fiction as Philip Latham, later discussed anti-matter, referred to as ‘contraterrene’ in his essay “Inside Out Matter” (1941), citing in support the Nobel Prize speeches of ‘three of the biggest names in atomic physics: W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger, and P. A. M. Dirac’ (p. 112). Dirac’s prediction, alongside the discovery of positrons by Carl Anderson in 1932, also influenced the later work of James Blish, whose story ‘Beep!’ (1954) introduced the faster-than-light ‘Dirac communicator’ which involves a form of quantum entanglement.[6]
Blish was well-known for insisting on the importance of theoretical soundness in science fiction, so when he turned to the analogy between an atom and the solar system, he offered quite a different picture from those sketched above. In ‘Nor Iron Bars’ (1957), a scientist constructs a spaceship out of ‘negative mass’[7] which, again invoking Dirac and gesturing at the latter’s energy ‘holes’ that were reinterpreted as positrons, takes it into the sub-atomic quantum domain. In this scenario, however, when the scientists step out onto the ‘surface’ of an electron, there is an acknowledgement of quantum ‘fuzziness’, at least (and in combining quantum mechanics with General Relativity, this may also be the first example of quantum gravity appearing in science fiction).
Many years later, Robert Heinlein was asked to write an article on Dirac & anti-matter for the Compton Yearbook, offering a typically boosterish summary of Dirac’s career (Heinlein, 1980). However, although he took some graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California and despite the impact of Einstein’s General Relativity, with its underlying framework of non-Euclidean geometry, on ‘And He Built a Crooked House’ (1941),[8] there is little evidence of any awareness of quantum theory in his stories. Even in ‘Let There Be Light’ (1940), in which a couple first invent light panels, then realise that they can reverse the arrangement and use light to generate electricity via a form of the photoelectric effect (which, as noted above, Einstein explained using Planck’s notion of quanta), the relevant scientific details are given entirely in non-quantum terms. Similarly, although it is claimed that L. Ron Hubbard studied engineering, mathematics and nuclear physics at George Washington University,[9] and although ‘The Professor Was a Thief’ (1940) mentions the ‘fourth dimension’ and ‘Einstein’s mathematics’, the science is poorly understood and again, quantum physics appears to have had no impact on his work. 
Of such ‘Big Names’ in genre SF, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke did at least have legitimate scientific credentials. Asimov, as is well known, obtained his MA in chemistry in 1941 and his PhD seven years later. However, although in ‘Half-Breed’ (1940; the title is now, rightly, considered offensive), the protagonist is asked to explain something in a book on quantum mechanics, the theory generally gets barely a mention anywhere in his stories. However, it has been speculated that the Mule, who appears in Foundation and Empire as a disruptive influence, might be thought of as a ‘resonance’ of new developments in physics, such as quantum mechanics, ‘which must have impinged deeply on Asimov as a chemist’ (Westfahl 1997). It is also suggested that the role of a human being in the final choice between First Foundation, Second Foundation, and Gaia, the universal consciousness, reflects certain understandings of quantum mechanics in which the observer collapses the wave function. Having noted that, Asimov’s own estimation of his grasp on quantum mechanics was that it was weak.[10]
Nevertheless, direct evidence of its impact can be found in Asimov’s spoof scientific paper, ‘The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline’ (1948), featuring a fictional substance which, it is claimed, starts dissolving before it touches water! Interestingly, the time of solution varies with the mental state of the observer, so that any period of hesitation reduces the negative time of the dissolution, often effectively eliminating it as it falls below the limits of detection. Although we don’t have an explicit case of wave-function collapse, we do have the observer’s consciousness affecting a physical process. In the sequel, ‘The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline’ (1953) this dependence of the manner of dissolution on the mental state of the observer is suggested as a way of diagnosing the latter. Asimov then speculates that the chemical bonds of a thiotimoline molecule are so ‘starved’ of space that some are forced into the time dimension, so that one bond exists in the past, with another in the future, thereby allowing for the recording of future events. With this as background, the final piece in the trilogy, ‘Thiotimoline and the Space Age’ (1960) describes the attempts to create a so-called ‘Heisenberg Failure’, in the sense of trying to get a sample of thiotimoline to dissolve without later adding water to it. In every case where the thiotimoline dissolves, something happened which causes water to be added at the appropriate time. And here Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle makes an appearance: we cannot say with certainty that an individual molecule will dissolve before the water is added and the probability of it not dissolving is quite appreciable but given the large number in any given sample, the chance of all or some fraction not dissolving is infinitesimal.[11]
Turning to the UK, Clarke also had a strong scientific background, of course, obtaining a degree in mathematics and physics at King’s College, University of London in 1948. Even before then, in one of his very early stories, ‘Retreat From Earth’ (1938) he mentions ‘quantum radiations’ (Clarke 2000, p. 20), and in ‘The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch’ (1957), one of the characters is described as giving lectures on quantum mechanics. But what is really interesting is Clarke’s use of liquid helium II as a device in two of his stories. The peculiar, ‘superfluid’ properties of this substance became known in the 1930s and were explained by Fritz London in terms of a kind of quantum ‘condensation’. That Clarke had an interest in condensed states of matter is evident from his short story, ‘The Fires Within’ (1949) in which atomic electron shells are speculated to be missing. Then in ‘Technical Error’ (1950) the occurrence of a dramatic reversal of symmetry, with disastrous consequences, is explained using liquid helium, superconductivity and 4-dimensional geometry. Here the fourth dimension is not that of time, but of space, and in a nod to the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics, Clarke writes that ‘space of several million dimensions has frequently been postulated in sub-atomic physics’ (2000, p. 64). Meanwhile, ‘Time’s Arrow’, also written in 1950, relies on the association between entropy increase and the direction of time, as attributed to Eddington, who presented it in his popular science book, The Nature of the Physical World (1928). [12] Once again Clarke uses the peculiar properties of superfluid Helium II, including, supposedly, the idea that it exhibits negative entropy,[13] which implies negative time, so that the substance can be used to power a trip to the prehistoric era.[14] 
Granted all this, the references to quantum mechanics in science fiction during its early years seem to be fleeting, far between and frequently inaccurate. As has been noted elsewhere, although the rise of the ‘pulps’ coincided with the new scientific developments, ‘special relativity is widely used’ but ‘quantum mechanics hardly at all apart from a few general references …’ (Lambourne et. al. 1990, p. 49). At first glance, this might not seem that surprising. After all, the theory was new and still under development, with many of its applications still to emerge and so one might expect a time lag before it appeared in literature.15 Certainly, that appears to be the case when it comes to the ‘old’ quantum theory of Bohr and Planck. However, there is a stark contrast here with the modernists, who incorporated the new physics into their works with remarkable alacrity. Or so it appears.
Modernism and Quantum Mechanics
It is debatable when, precisely, literary Modernism began, which authors should be included under its umbrella and which themes and issues it should be taken to incorporate. Broadly speaking, however, we can say that, as a movement, it began in the early twentieth century, that it included such writers as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett and that it attempted to break with traditional modes of representation by engaging with the latest advances in science and technology, amongst other cultural shifts. When it comes to that last aspect, there is now a burgeoning literature regarding the influence on and incorporation into this literature of developments in physics, specifically relativity theory and quantum mechanics. So, for example, Joyce is known to have asked for a work by Einstein (most likely the latter’s own popular exposition, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory; first published in German in 1916, translated into English in 1920). Woolf, likewise, was familiar with the popular works of Einstein’s famous British advocate, the Astronomer-Royal Eddington and also had on her shelf books by renowned physicists James Jeans (Jeans [1930]) and George Thomson (Thomson [also 1930])[15].
It is worth pausing here just to note the differences between these latter two scientists and their works. Jeans was much more steeped in the tradition of classical physics and represents a transition figure in the history of early twentieth-century physics, living through the development of quantum theory without making a major contribution to it. Thomson, however, as well as being the son of the discoverer of the electron, was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his research demonstrating the particle’s wave-like nature (see Navarro 2010). Consequently, although both books emphasised these wave-like properties of matter, as embodied in Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, Thomson, being more on top of the latest developments, also recognised, albeit towards the end of his book, that these properties could not be understood in literal terms.
Why is this significant? Because the emerging quantum picture of the world is claimed to be reflected in Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves (Woolf 1931), regarded as her most experimental and innovative work. It features the overlapping internal dialogues of six characters, three male, three female, as they grow from childhood through to old age, with the soliloquies broken up by descriptions of the sea pounding the shore by a sunlit cottage during the course of one day. As the novel progresses the identities of the various characters alternately emerge, become sharply defined, then recede back into a diffuse state again, before repeating the cycle. This reflects Woolf’s overarching concerns regarding identity, self and community and, in particular, the tension between our distinct individuality and the tendency to merge into the crowd. This has been compared with Thomson’s discussion of the dichotomy between the loss of an electron’s identity within wave mechanics and its ‘stubborn individuality’ as a particle, subject to the constraints of Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (Livingstone 2018, p. 67).[16]
Further resonances with quantum theory have also been identified, as when a character expresses their selfhood in terms of possible incompatible personages, which are then reduced to a definite identity when they are observed. This has been compared to the localization of a quantum particle by observation, or more generally the shift from a state of indeterminacy to determinacy (Livingstone 2018, p. 72), as represented by the collapse of the wave function. In another passage, as the same character is contemplating their life, they suddenly feel as if the table in front of them has become insubstantial. This is strikingly reminiscent of the opening of Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, where he writes of two tables, one of which is the ‘common-sense’ or everyday table which is solid and has all the usual properties attributed to it, and the other is the table as described by quantum theory, which is ‘mostly emptiness’ (Beer 1995).[17]
Nevertheless, it has been argued that the relationship between physics and Modernism was not unidirectional (Crossland 2018; 2020). Catrina Livingstone, for example, has proposed a ‘loop feedback’ model, according to which ‘Woolf and the science writers are involved in a reciprocal process of influence’ (Livingstone 2018, p. 67). Accordingly, ‘the concepts of duality and indeterminacy in quantum physics resonate with Woolf’s pre-existing preoccupation with the multiplicity of identity, causing her to use scientific models and scientific experiments in her depictions of selfhood. Conversely, the multiplicity and fluidity of identity found in modernist writing in general, and Woolf’s writing in particular, resonate with the preoccupations of the physicists, causing them to emphasize the implications that quantum physics has for identity’ (p. 76).
However, the claim that Woolf’s writing ‘caused’ physicists to emphasise the implications of quantum mechanics for identity goes too far. First of all, what we are talking about here are popularizations of quantum physics, and although they were written by physicists themselves, the reciprocal process of influence does not manifest in the relevant papers as published in the leading journals of the day. Secondly, the issue of the implications of quantum physics for particle identity had been ‘in the air’ for many years – indeed, going back to the origins of the theory – and became explicit in 1927, through the work of Born, Heisenberg and others (French and Krause 2006; for further resonances identified in the literature, see Cousins 2023 pp. 29-30).
This drew on the development, between 1924 and 1927, of two forms of ‘quantum statistics’ describing the aggregate behaviour of quantum entities. First, Satyendra Bose retro-engineered Planck’s original work and showed that photons behaved according to what came to be called ‘Bose-Einstein statistics’ (Einstein had his name attached because he drew out the implications of Bose’s work). Subsequently, Dirac and Enrico Fermi showed, independently of one another, that electrons and protons collectively behaved quite differently, according to what is now known as ‘Fermi-Dirac statistics’. The difference is that whereas bosons tend to congregate together in the same state, fermions display the opposite tendency. It is this latter behaviour that is captured by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, mentioned above, and which explains the Periodic Table as well as chemical bonding (and hence the solidity of tables, for example). Crucially, it was realised that both forms of statistics depend on particles of the same kind being understood as fundamentally indistinguishable in a sense that goes beyond merely sharing the same set of properties, such as mass, charge and so on. Schrödinger subsequently expressed this as a loss of identity, writing ‘It is beyond doubt that the question of ‘sameness’, of identity, really and truly has no meaning’ (Schrödinger 1996, p. 122).
Thomson hadn’t quite grasped this implication of the new quantum statistics when he wrote about the ‘stubborn individuality’ of the electron as a particle.[18] More importantly, it is not the case that physicists regarded the identity of such particles as ‘fluid’ in the way that the likes of Woolf are claimed to have done, with their individuality ‘merging’ into their wave-like nature. Indeed, this is not how wave-particle duality should be understood. As Bohr emphasised, whether wave-like or particle-like behaviour is observed depends on the experimental setup. It is this which lies behind his famous doctrine of ‘complementarity’, about which a great deal has been written (see Faye and Folse 2017). Although he went on to extend this into the biological and psychological spheres, he originally intended it to refer to the relationship between two kinds of descriptions of a physical system, one causal, as represented by the property of momentum, and the other, spatio-temporal, as represented by position. Such properties are mathematically represented by ‘non-commuting’ operators and it is these that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is concerned with, and which has also been elaborated far beyond its original theoretical basis.
The claim that this notion of complementarity resonates in some sense with Woolf’s writings is commonplace in the literature (Cousin 2022, p. 30). Thus, the complexity of familial inter-relationships expressed in her semi-autobiographical novel, To The Lighthouse (Woolf 1927), has been analysed in terms of various kinds of duality, gender-based and otherwise, which have then been related to Bohr’s notion and wave-particle duality more generally. However, the novel was actually written between 1925 and 1927 and as Xavier Cousin notes, during that time, ‘quantum mechanics was only just starting to be formulated by a handful of isolated physicists; complementarity did not exist, as conceptual issues that prompted the need for it had not yet been appreciated; and popularised discussions of quantum theory were still limited to the mysteries of the atom, and hence the “old” version of the science, which – while relevant – did not contain any of the quantum-concepts from mature quantum mechanics that scholars typically identify in Woolf’ (Cousin 2022, p. 71).
A similar sceptical stance has been taken by Michael Whitworth towards claims that elements of The Waves, as well as its very title (which was changed from ‘The Moths’) are also suggestive of these kinds of resonances (Whitworth 2001). Thus, he argues that consideration of her earlier novels ‘reveals that Woolf had developed many aspects of her own wave/particle model of the self in anticipation of the physicists’ (p. 162).[19] Furthermore, Whitworth suggests that the above resonances, in particular between Woolf’s novel and the work of Schrödinger, are ‘disrupted’ by considerations of the possible influence of other scientific discourses (p. 164). So, for example, the characters in The Waves describe their wave-like state in terms of filaments or fibres, connecting them to one another or allowing them to hear sounds from far away. However, Whitworth maintains, rather than taking this as representing the influence of quantum physics, it could just as easily be drawn from metaphors used to describe magnetic lines of force (p. 164). Of course, this is possible but it is worth noting that Thomson, whose popular book Woolf had on her shelf as indicated above (but whom Whitworth does not mention at all), used the analogy of the gossamer spider, with its filaments stretched out around it, as an analogy for the electron and its waves (Thomson 1929, p. 220).[20] Such comparative evaluations of the impact of particular scientific theories, and their mediation via analogies and metaphors, on literary works are notoriously tricky, but in the case of The Waves and quantum mechanics, at least, such impact cannot be so easily dismissed.[21]
Conclusion
Why is it that there is a plethora of studies arguing for the influence of quantum notions on Modernist writers such as Woolf, whereas there is so little corresponding material when it comes to the early science fiction authors? Certainly, it was not the case that the UK was more receptive to the development of quantum mechanics than the USA (Coben 1971). One might wonder about the role of science popularisation, although Eddington and Thomson for example, gave several series of popular lectures in the USA throughout the 1920s and ‘30s.
I suspect the answer may lie elsewhere. In his autobiography, Clarke refers to ‘hyperspace’, as licenced by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as a kind of ‘Swiss Army Knife’, able to be used by science-fiction writers for many different purposes (Clarke 1990, p. 58). Thus Gernsback, in another editorial, waxed lyrical about Einstein’s latest attempt at unifying gravity and electromagnetism but the emphasis was all on the possibility of building ‘the fantastic machines which our scientification prophets have told us of for many years’ (Gernsback 1929, p. 5).[22]
Quantum mechanics, at least as initially presented and interpreted, offered no such opportunities, at least not until the elaboration of the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’[23] The Modernists, on the other hand, had no need for, and indeed eschewed, any such technology-oriented device.[24] As extended, dramatically, from the microscopic realm to that of human relationships, what the theory gave them instead was an alternative framing of the latter, one that allowed them to articulate concerns and ways of thought that they may already have been entertaining but which they could now express in novel ways. It would be some years before the prophets of ‘scientification’ would catch up with such developments.[25]
Steven French is a retired historian and philosopher of science who writes reviews for The BSFA Review and SF2 Concatenation. Some of his own stories can also be found scattered across the internet.
References
Asimov, I. (1972), The Early Asimov, vol. 2, Fawcett Crest.
Beer, G. (1995), ‘Eddington and the Idiom of Modernism: Physics, Politics and Literature in the 1930’s’, in Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, ed. H. Krips. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 295-315.
Bowler, P.J. (2009), Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early TwentiethCentury Britain. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Cheng, J. (2012), Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Clarke, A.C., (1990), Astounding Days. Victor Gollanz.
Clarke, A.C. (2000), The Collected Stories, Gollancz.
Coben, S. (1971), ‘The Scientific Establishment and the Transmission of Quantum Mechanics to the United States, 1919-32’, The American Historical Review, 76, pp. 442466.
Cousin, X. R. A. (2022) UnQuantum Woolf: The Many Intellectual Contexts of To the Lighthouse’s Metaphorical Wave-Particle Binary, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/14558/
Crossland, Rachel (2018), Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Crossland, R. (2020), ‘Waves, Particles and Pronouns – Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, History of Science Blog of the Royal Society;
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/06/waves-particles-and-pronouns-virginiawoolfs-orlando/
Cummings, R. (1970/1919), ‘The Girl in the Golden Atom’, in Moskowitz, S (ed.), Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the ‘Scientific Romance’ in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 175-220.
Darwin, C.G. (1931), The New Conceptions of Matter. London, Bell and Sons.
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[1] I am here only considering Anglophone works due to space constraints. Further research is required to examine the impact, if any, of quantum physics on the science fiction literature of other languages, including, most obviously given the scientific context, French, German and Russian.
[2] A recent study of the relationship between science and science-fiction in inter-war America (Cheng 2012) contains an entire chapter devoted to Albert Einstein, relativity theory and time-travel but has only one mention of quantum theory, in the context of Einstein’s unhappiness with the later formulation of the theory and his famous statement that ‘God does not play dice’ (Cheng 2012, p. 186).
[3] Surprisingly, despite now appearing in numerous popular representations of science, from Ursula le Guin’s short story ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ (1974) to several episodes of The Big Bang Theory, Schrödinger’s thought experiment had almost no impact on the physics community until the late 1950s.
[4] H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free (1914), is usually cited as the forerunner of such stories and John W. Campbell’s foreshadowing of the development of the atomic bomb is well-documented (Nevala-Lee 2018 pp. 188-197).
[5] Several years later, in his own story, ‘Super-Neutron’ (1941), Asimov dismissed the comparison between atoms and solar systems as ‘being in a class with the Ptolemaic scheme of universe’ (Asimov 1972, p. 57). Unfortunately, he too gets the physics wrong when it comes to gravity.
[6] ‘De Broglie waves’ are also mentioned, which we’ll come across again below and, more unusually, so is the name of the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl who helped introduce the mathematics of group theory into quantum physics. Blish also had a fascination with Patrick Blackett, whose observations of cosmic ray tracks helped confirm the existence of the positron and whose work on ‘gravitational magenetism’ influenced Blish’s idea of an anti-gravity ‘spindizzy drive’ introduced in the Cities in Flight series.
[7] Negative mass was first proposed as a theoretical possibility by Joaquin Luttinger in 1951 and was subsequently developed by Hermann Bondi who, together with Fred Hoyle, advocated the steady-state alternative to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.
[8] There is a notable contrast between the influence of relativity theory and that of quantum mechanics during this period.
[9] Although there is no specific course in nuclear physics given in The George Washington University Bulletin of 1932, ‘Modern Physical Phenomena’ is listed, which included ‘Molecular and Atomic Physics’, taught by Professor Thomas B Brown, whose book, Foundations of Modern Physics (Wiley 1940), does include extensive consideration of quantum theory and its applications.
[10] As standardly understood, the collapse of the quantum wave-function due to any purported role of the observer has nothing to do with making a choice or decision. Having said that, recent elaborations of the Many Worlds Interpretation – according to which there is no such collapse of course – have drawn on decision theory in order to accommodate the theory’s probabilistic aspect; see Wallace 2012.
[11] These spoof papers are discussed in May 2019.
[12] Quantum physicist George Darwin, grandson of the great Charles who also wrote a popular book on quantum physics (Darwin 1931), also gets a mention.
[13] It doesn’t. The concept was introduced by Schrödinger in 1944.
[14] One of the physicists in the story is described as a Quaker – a clear reference to Eddington, who was a conscientious objector during WWI. Clarke’s tutor at King’s, George McVittie, a cosmologist and expert on General Relativity, was a PhD student of Eddington’s.
15 Lest it be thought there was a geographical ‘lag’, with American scientists slow to catch up with theoretical developments, although this was true up until the mid-1920s, by 1930 US-based physicists no longer felt the need to travel to Europe to learn the latest ideas.
[15] One of the editors of the series in which this book was published was H.A.L. Fisher, Woolf’s cousin.
[16] It is worth noting that in addition to the above books, Woolf was also aware of newspaper reports, book reviews, lectures and radio broadcasts about quantum theory (Livingstone 2018; 2022). Indeed, Whitworth (2001) prioritises these over the popular science books just mentioned.
[17] It has been pointed out, however, that there is no ‘incontrovertible evidence that Woolf ever read his
[Eddington’s] writing (Cousin 2022, p. 22). Nevertheless, when she has a character in her final novel, Between the Acts (1941) insist that according to the latest science ‘nothing’s solid’, it is hard to deny the correspondence.
[18] As it turns out, quantum particles can either be regarded as ‘non-individuals’, where this requires not only a new metaphysics but a new underlying logic as well, or they can be taken to be individuals, but then constraints have to be introduced to account for the relevant statistics; for further details, see French and Krause 2006.
[19] Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Einstein ascribed particle-like properties to light with his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 and explicitly used a wave/particle model in 1917 to lay down the theoretical foundation of what we now call laser technology.
[20] As already noted, Whitworth emphasises the role of periodical and radio broadcasts when considering Woolf’s influences, which is why I’ve cited Thomson’s 1929 Listener piece here. The analogy is also given in his 1930 book.
[21] Cousin also acknowledges that Woolf’s later works, such as The Waves, could have been influenced by the ‘new physics’ (2022, p. 208; although see p. 36).
[22] Specifically, ‘space-flyers’, which would use sunlight to generate electricity which, in turn, if Einstein’s new theory were experimentally confirmed, would nullify gravity.
[23] In this regard, it is worth noting Peter Bowler’s comment: ‘Eddington’s writings on the new physics not only deflected attention away from the potential practical applications; they also stressed that by undermining old-fashioned materialism, quantum and wave mechanics reintroduced a role for the human mind as a component of reality’ (Bowler 2009, p. 23).
[24] Hence Cousin’s observation of the lack of any ‘smoking gun’ in Woolf as another source of scepticism regarding the effect of quantum physics on her work is beside the point (Cousin 2022, p. 209).
[25] Woolf herself appreciated Stapledon’s work, for example, telling him that he was grasping ideas that she had tried to express, ‘much more fumblingly’ (quoted in Robinson 2019). The impact of advances in astronomy on both have been explored in Henry 2003.
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