Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines.
The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.

• Contents 6
• Introduction 10
• Part I: Epistemic Functions of Narration and Metaphor in Science 32
• Insight by Metaphor – The Epistemic Role of Metaphor in Science 32
• Epistemic Narrativity in Albert Einstein’s Treatise on Special Relativity 58
• Albert Einstein’s “Physics and Reality” and “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” 114
• Physics and Fiction 148
• Part II: Concepts: Formation and Transfer 158
• Concept Formation in Physics from a Linguist’s Perspective 158
• Everything in Context 172
• Induction after Electromagnetism 188
• The Paradoxical Interplay of Exactitude and Indefiniteness 206
• The Horizon of the Horizon 240
• Interference 262
• Literary Epistemology 288