Was Schroedinger first or Borges: Which came first, the cat or the mirror?

April 2, 2009 10:32 PM

Did Borges read Schroedinger?
The arithmetical system of Tlön "states that the operation of counting modifies quantities and changes them from indefinites into definites."
The sequence of history makes it possible. Borges's omnivorous reading habits and academic/social prowess help the probability. Yet Schroedinger's initial obscurity in the matter makes it less plausible.
Google has done nothing to answer the vital question: did Borges hear about Schroedinger's cat before he wrote Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius?

Do we/can we know?
Honestly, this has been bugging me and I know mefi is a generally Borges/Schroedinger loving crowd. mefi is also concerned with memes and how they function. Schroedinger's cat made her debut in 1935. Borges had his seminal work published in 1940. But Scroedinger's cat was really just two little paragraphs in a long treatise until pop-science really got a hold of it in the 50s, right? Who's influencing who here?

Schroedinger -> Borges -> Lit critics -> science critics?
Schroedinger -> Academia -> Borges?
Borges -> Science critics -> Schroedinger says "Yeah that's what I meant!"

Anyone got the significant figures?

posted by es_de_bah to writing & language (12 comments total)

I'll start right off by saying that the umlaut in the title and the scattered German references raise a few eyebrows, as does the futuristic "1947postscript" about the encyclopeadia's influence on Nazism, which evokes Schroedinger's refugeeism .
Still, it just seems too good.
posted by es_de_bah at 10:39 PM on April 2

I don't know if this is entirely helpful, but it's an interesting statement of what Borges might think of this question:

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
- J. L. Borges, Kafka and his Precursors
posted by koeselitz at 10:50 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]

In the same orthogonal vein as koeselitz, there's Pierre Menard.
posted by juv3nal at 10:59 PM on April 2

while I appreciate it, all this quote does is further obscure the answer to my question.
posted by es_de_bah at 11:00 PM on April 2

Why Schroedinger in particular? Quantum mechanics wasn't new in 1940, and a statement like Borges's could easily have been made by someone who'd absorbed some knowledge of the uncertainty principle, say. For a clear example, see Heisenberg's Microscope.

Your quotation is related to the Schroedinger's cat idea, but has closer neighbors in writing about physics.
posted by grobstein at 11:07 PM on April 2

this is a good point. can you get a good handle on who Borges would have been digging?
posted by es_de_bah at 11:43 PM on April 2

Considering that the next sentence is "The fact that several individuals counting the same quantity arrive at the same result is, say their psychologists, an example of the association of ideas or the good use of memory", it doesn't sound like Heisenberg to me. More like a making up a world where people have different ideas about the boundaries of map and territory.
posted by dhoe at 11:44 PM on April 2

You don't even have to go to quantum mechanics:

That Number is intirely the Creature of the Mind, even though the other Qualities be allowed to exist without, will be evident to whoever considers, that the same thing bears a different Denomination of Number, as the Mind views it with different respects. Thus, the same Extension is One or Three or Thirty Six, according as the Mind considers it...

- Berkley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

And if I'm recalling correctly, Berkley's even gets name-dropped in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
posted by ormondsacker at 12:08 AM on April 3 [4 favorites]

I'm still not quite sure what's being talked about, but there is a lot of subtlety around exactly what type of "indeterminate" a quantum system is in. For example, it's perfectly legal (even unavoidable sometimes) for different observers to measure the exact same system (repeatedly prepared) and get different results, which then become the persistent value.
posted by gensubuser at 12:44 AM on April 3

Totally side note - I can't remember where I read it but this writer jokingly criticized Foucault saying "what I read in Foucault's writings I had known and learned all already by reading Borges."
posted by suedehead at 1:05 AM on April 3

Ormandsacker has it. Your quote seems to simply reflect the theory of Subjective Idealism, to which Berkley was a major contributor.
posted by Neiltupper at 1:36 AM on April 3

Ormandsacker has it.

Indeed. The vague resemblance to Schrödinger is a product of the latter becoming omnipresent in cultural consciousness in recent decades. (N.b.: Though the cat appeared in 1935, Schrödinger's important papers in quantum theory were published in 1926; since "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" doesn't mention a cat, I don't know why it's relevant.)
posted by languagehat at 1:44 PM on April 3