Abstract

By examining the works of the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, and the parallels it has with modern physics, literature and science converge in their quest for truth regarding the structure and meaning of the universe. The classical perception of physics as a "hard" science--that of quantitative, rational thought which was established during the Newtonian era--has been replaced by the "new physics," which integrates the so-called "soft" elements into its paradigm. It presents us with a universe based not exclusively on a series of particle-like interactions, or a "billiard-ball" hypothesis where discrete objects have a measurable position and velocity in absolute space and time, but rather on a combination of these mechanistic properties and those that make up the non-physical side of nature such as intuition, consciousness, and emotion. According to physicists like James Jeans science has been "humanized" to the extent that the universe as a "great machine" has been converted into a "great thought." ;In nearly all his collections of essays and short stories, Borges complements the new physics by producing a literature that can be described as "scientized." The abstract, metaphysical implications and concerns of the new world-view, such as space, time, language, consciousness, free will, determinism, etc., appear repeatedly throughout Borges' texts, and are treated in terms that are remarkably similar to those expressed in the scientific texts whose authors include Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. ;As a final comparison, Borges and post-modern physicists address the question of the individual's ability to ever comprehend the universe. They share an attitude of incredulity toward all models and theories of reality simply because they are based on partial information, and therefore seen only as conjectures