Sprachen der Physik

With the rise of theoretical physics and its groundbreaking revolutions on the epochal threshold around 1900, mathematics seemed to evolve into the “native language of modernity” (Herbert Mehrtens). Although the theoretical physicists of that time often diagnosed common language with a deficient character in comparison to mathematical formalisms, the relationship between “language and reality” (Werner Heisenberg) played a central role in the epistemic reflections of quantum theory’s founding fathers. What’s even more astonishing than this “(language) philosophy of the physicists” (Erhard Scheibe), which should be analyzed against the background of the linguistic-philosophical movements in the first half of the 20th century, is the fact that (natural) languages and related concepts (grammar, translation, etc.) seemed to constitute an important field of reference for theoretical physicists, especially when they discussed different (mathematical) approaches and transdisciplinary problems.

Starting from short impulse presentations, this workshop will jointly analyze texts from the broader sphere of theoretical physics and the “languages of physics” discussed within them against their background in the history of culture and science. Here, we will specifically focus on the ways in which language and (the observation of) nature are set into relation with one another in atomic physics, on reflections of disciplinary linguistic diversity, as well as on (natural) languages, which the physicists considered particularly relevant in the description of nature.

Fig. above: cover sheet of a folder “Glosse” from the estate of Erwin Schrödinger, source: Austrian Central Library for Physics