ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to give an idea of how the Husserlian mind had at least an indirect impact on contemporary physics by influencing the thinking of Hermann Weyl, one of the most prolific mathematicians and theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. I will take a closer look at Husserl’s notorious annihilation of the world thought experiment in order to elucidate Hermann Weyl’s remark that the coordinate system ought to be understood as the necessary residuum of the annihilation of the ego. By doing so, I will not only show how Weyl made creative use of central components of Husserl’s phenomenological methodology to better understand the nature of mathematical representation in physics. Ultimately, the upshot of this chapter is that on Weyl’s view, the perspectivity, and subject-relativity of every symbolic-mathematical representation of reality is not just an artifact of interpretation, it is indeed mandated by physics itself.
