A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski remembers her childhood

I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white; white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It’s the best I could do. Some lack of courage – I wouldn’t want to be thought extreme – has prevented me from having a white bedstead and side tables. They are wood, and they annoy me a little. Opposite my bed, in the very small room, a wall of mirrored cupboards reflects the whiteness back at itself, making it twice the size it thought it was. In the morning, if I arrange myself carefully when I wake, I can open my eyes to nothing but whiteness.

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Vol. 19 No. 1 · 2 January 1997 » Jenny Diski » A Feeling for Ice (print version)
pages 13-22 | 17014 words

Letters

From Mark Harris

Jenny Diski confuses two subtly different ideas in quantum theory (LRB, 2 January). One is a fundamental (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), while the other is a thought experiment (Schrödinger’s cat). She is right that her mother may indeed correspond to a kind of Schrödinger’s cat if she has made no contact with her, and has no knowledge of her whereabouts, or even her existence. However, this is not the Uncertainty Principle, which instead is concerned with what happens when a measurement has actually been made on a quantum mechanical object. In particular, it relates the uncertainty involved in attempting to measure simultaneously both the momentum and position of the object. Since she has made no measurements of her mother’s position, let alone her momentum, the Uncertainty Principle is irrelevant.

Mark Harris
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

From Barbara Smoker

There is a minor error in Jenny Diski’s piece: Prince Monolulu (whom I met a number of times) was never a bookmaker: he was a racing tipster.

Barbara Smoker
Bromley, Kent

From Matt Fretton

Whose failure of understanding is the greater: the person who confuses Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, or the sort of pedant that responds to a piece of writing as intensely moving as Jenny Diski’s ‘Skating to Antarctica’ with an observation as arid as that of Mark Harris (Letters, 23 January)? And who gives a fuck if Prince Monolulu was a bookmaker, racing tipster, or even an employee of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire?

Matt Fretton
London, W1