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Article ID: CBB722673013

Experimental Identities: Quantum Physics in Popular Science Writing and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (2018)

Catriona Livingstone (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 11
Issue: 1
Pages: 66-81
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

DOI: 10.12929

URI: http://www.literatureandscience.org/volume-10-issue-2-2017/

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Popularization Popular culture Quantum mechanics Science and literature 20th century Woolf, Virginia

It is the contention of this article that one of the ways in which The Waves makes science “alive” is in its application of the entities and processes of contemporary science to questions of human identity. More specifically, it sets out to show that Woolf employs the language and structure of quantum physical experiments in order to reiterate Bernard’s perception that the self, far from being fixed or definable, is multiple and unlimited. However, this is not to accept the binary distinction between science and literature that Dickinson’s letter seems implicitly to endorse (he implies that without Woolf’s literary intervention, science would be dead). On the contrary, I will demonstrate that Woolf’s project of using concepts drawn from physics to destabilize fixed models of identity is one that she shares with contemporary popular science writers. Moreover, I offer a new way of considering the relationship between Woolf and contemporary popular science (and literature and science more broadly). Instead of constructing a straightforward narrative of influence between the two disciplines, this article demonstrates that Woolf and the science writers are involved in a reciprocal process of influence, which can be modelled by the feedback loop. Literary and scientific writers, it suggests, draw upon one another’s ideas because they resonate with their own pre-existing concerns. The result of this process of feedback is that the two domains in question – quantum physics and human identity – become more and more associated in the cultural imagination. Through a focus on Woolf, a writer detached from scientific institutions but engaging with the popular manifestations of scientific discourse, we can thus arrive at an improved understanding of the way in which science transformed, and was transformed by, the culture of the 1920s and 30s

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