STUDIOVOICE #1 — Dialogue and Crossing Borders: Werner Heisenberg’s The Part and the Whole

New Year Reading Recommendation for 2011 Vol.5

Der Teil und das Ganze by Werner Heisenberg

Dialogue and Crossing Borders

Walking through Tokyo, one sometimes catches fragments of conversation from strangers in cafes, bars, restaurants, or trains. Most of them vanish immediately, as they should. But every now and then a phrase lands with a small freshness, like finding flowers beside a road one thought one already knew.

Werner Heisenberg, born in Germany in 1901, was one of the central figures in quantum mechanics and received the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of thirty-one. It would be easy to flatten him into the familiar shape of “genius,” that convenient label with which we excuse ourselves from thinking any further. Yet the richness of The Part and the Whole lies less in the monument called Heisenberg than in the dense exchanges he had with the people around him.

The book is made of conversations: with friends, with Einstein, with fellow scientists, and even with people who stood on the dangerous side of history. Heisenberg does not appear as a silent figure sealed inside a study. He thinks while speaking. He moves through dialogue, and in doing so expands the border of his own field and of the fields around him.

Today one hears words of enclosure everywhere: pessimism, anxiety, resignation, the small complaints of a society convinced that it has already run out of exits. Coffee shops may have turned into Starbucks and the old cafe culture may have changed its costume, but the places where people talk, drink, and think together have not entirely disappeared. Perhaps the important thing for 2011 is to recover that air: to grasp the part and the whole of things through conversation, and to cross a border or two before habit quietly closes the gate.

Werner Heisenberg
Der Teil und das Ganze
Japanese translation by Kazuo Yamazaki, Misuzu Shobo.