Beyond Language

The notion that all scientific models and theories are approxi- mate and that their verbal interpretations always suffer from the inaccuracy of our language was already commonly accepted by scientists at the beginning of this century, when a new and completely unexpected development took place. The study of the world of atoms forced physicists to realize that our common language is not only inaccurate, but totally inadequate to describe the atomic and subatomic reality. Quantum theory and relativity theory, the two bases of modern physics, have made it clear that this reality transcends classical logic and that we cannot talk about it in ordinary language. Thus Heisenberg writes : The most difficult problem . . . concerning the use of the language arises in quantum theory. Here we have at first no simple guide for correlating the mathematical symbols with concepts of ordinary language; and the only thing