Despite their huge success, the natural sciences have a problem: they don’t seem to leave much room for the human subject. Edmund Husserl thought this was reason enough to declare science was in ‘crisis’! But an influential, though widely misunderstood, interpretation of quantum mechanics by physicists Fritz London and Edmund Bauer, places the subject at the heart of our most successful mathematical physics theory yet, writes Steven French.

Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is widely regarded as both his most accessible and most influential work, written under the shadow of fascist ideology looming over Europe. Based on lectures given in 1935 at Charles University and the German University in Prague, Husserl opens by addressing the ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ question that many in the audience must have been asking themselves:

‘I expect that at this place, dedicated as it is to the sciences, the very title of these lectures … will incite controversy.’