Insight and discovery, and our place in the universe
Reality check by Bondo Wyszpolski “The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” by William Egginton (Pantheon, 338 pp, $32) The subtitle should immediately clear the house, but those who remain are in for a ride. William Egginton has corralled three pilgrims from different disciplines, and shows how each of them trekked up the mountain we call Reality. Or, to put this another way, the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), and Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), strange bedfellows though they may seem, each in his own way contributed to the undermining of metaphysical prejudice. Okay, what does that mean? Basically, there’s the reality we’re wired to see and imagine and a reality that’s very different, one which we’re not wired to see. It’s comparable to an optical illusion, where your eyes tell you one thing but your reason tells you something else. Or as Heisenberg himself put it, “we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Keep that in mind, because many of the theories and concepts explicated by…
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