CHAPTER 9: Quantum Physics and Human Language

Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they have evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise properties of all the physical situations allowed by fundamental physics. In brief, human languages contain “excess baggage” that must be qualified, discarded, or otherwise reformed to give a clear account, in the context of fundamental physics, of even the everyday phenomena that languages have evolved to describe. The surest route to clarity is to express the constructions of human languages in the language of fundamental physical theory, not the other way around. These ideas are illustrated by an analysis of the verb “to happen” and the word “reality” in special relativity and the modern quantum mechanics of closed systems.