Mara Beller

“Mara Beller has probably succeeded in making what may well be the first truly penetrating assessment of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicists have been too much in awe of the mystique of their topic to have done anything comparable. [...] I am sorry if this role reversal of old and new is an anticlimactic answer to three quarter century of Copenhagen riddle. Mara Beller made me do it!”

“Shapin’s admirable essay misses, however, the point of Mara Beller’s piece in Physics Today (1998). Beller is not urging a more thoughtful attitude on physicists by pointing out that the wisdom of Bohr would sound like nonsense if it came from sociology or cultural studies. Quite the opposite. She is denouncing the great icons of quantum physics for uttering what she takes to be nonsense, and she is urging scientists to clean up their own act before they get on with the business of mocking others.”

“I read the Beller article in Physics Today. In fact, I’ve read several of her articles before: she writes very well. She of course has a point about Bohr’s intractable language; I’ve spent many hours myself trying to make some sense of it all. To the people with less patience than I, I’m sure it’s not obvious that they should struggle to find some meaning there. That’s exactly why someone has to get in and say something reasonable about (a modernday version of) the “Copenhagen interpretation” before things get out of hand.”

“Indeed, in 1998, after the physicist Alan Sokal mocked humanists for delving into physics to support their ideas in a way that seemed ignorant at best and zany at worst – in what has come to be known as “Sokal’s hoax” – historian Mara Beller published an article in Physics Today entitled “The Sokal hoax: at whom are we laughing?”. She cited remarks by Bohr – but also by Heisenberg and Pauli – to make the point that in this respect physicists could sometimes be as zany as humanists, and there is no neat way to distinguish between the two.”

“The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science condude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors ... have no clothes." But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?”

“Astonishing statements, hardly distinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of Bohr; Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan. And they are not just casual, incidental remarks.”

“Like the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, whom Steven Weinberg attacked in his 1996 New York Review of Books article on Sokal's hoax, Bohr was notorious for the obscurity of his writing. Yet physicists relate to Derrida's and Bohr's obscurities in fundamentally different ways: to Derrida's with contempt, to Bohr's with awe. Bohr's obscurity is attributed, time and again, to a "depth and subtlety" that mere mortals are not equipped to comprehend.”