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rose, you're amazing and hilarious.  keep it up!  i love bohr; he tried so hard.  what was really interesting for me reading karen today was all the memories triggered from my own quantum mechanics class last year, and from the feynman books i have read and/or owned, and from reading "properties of light" last week (hey, i had to find something to do while lying on the beach!).  i may very well get out my old qm text and see if it talks about complimentarity (i'm pretty sure it does, because i certainly know what it means).  i'd like to speak to the issue karen (i feel so close to her these days) raises about responsibility in science as a kind of focus on meaning and interpretation, as a foundation for calculation and use.  i remember very, very distinctly being told, a number of times in my physics career but especially in quantum, that i should focus on doing the problems, and not on trying to "understand" the material.  upon reflection, i realized that this had puzzled and frustrated me so much in chemistry (in high school; i had to take it twice) that i nearly failed the class.  the equations never MEANT anything to me, no matter how much time i spent in lab.  fortunately, i've been blessed with (mostly) phenomenal (both senses!) professors of physics, and i can say frankly now that q.m. is the branch of physics i feel i understand best, despite the fact that i was taught to "do" it rather than "understand" it.  because sometimes understanding can only come with the doing.  like playing sports - you can read about rowing all your life but until you're on the water with an oar in your hands, none of it means anything real to you.  on the other hand, all practice and no concept is exactly what all of my self-identified "non-science" friends (note: i think this distinction is ridiculous and is part of the root problem here) complain about in their mandatory lab and quantitative classes.  so how did i learn quantum mechanics?  the same way one learns to row, or play hockey (to use my professor's metaphor): i did it and did it and did it until it frustrated the hell out of me, and kept doing it until i could get answers, and then i asked questions about what they meant and hounded my professor/coach until i got it.  i took a trans/disciplinary approach - i read my text, and feynman books, and the play "copenhagen," and now karen barad, and i've asked all kinds of people all kinds of questions.  and that's what i call real learning.  the problem is, i couldn't get all that from my class.  i can't really fault my professor for his focus on problem-solving - it's what graduate schools would expect me to master and frankly, it was my foundation.  but i completely understand why karen points out such things as the occasional addition of bits and pieces of history and philosophy as tokenism and advocates for a more rich approach, because without all that extra work and interest i would never have understood anything - not even the problems i was being trained to solve.  so my question is now, how do we design a course that will cover all that stuff?  karen promptly presents an answer for me, in that second article, and as much as i appreciate that... i couldn't help but notice she needed a mellon grant to get it done.  come on, guys - her whole point is that sicence literacy SHOULDN'T be the sole providence of scientists, not if we want to promote a revolution in the way the world does physics (responsibly, that is).  to be trans/disciplinary we need to the help and support of ALL disciplines of knowledge...  all you "non-sciencey" people out there.  society is NOT discontinuous, even if quantum-level measurements are, and we can't pretend to do it on our own.  i don't know, really.  these are just my thoughts and reactions.  i look forward to hearing y'all tomorrow.