Class Notes 3/21/11

 March 21, 2011

GIST Notes 

Panel feedback, what worked, what didn’t:

more interactive

more dialogue

more time

For Monday:

Come to class ready to speak about collective practices we have not explored together

Speaking for a group as though you are studying this group i.e. an anthropologist or sociologists

How does this group engage with science

Possible groups include: post op transsexuals, doctors without boarders, car makers, scientists studying climate change, emergency responders, first group of hominids to use tools, midwives, etc.

Class postings, some thoughts: Comments on feminist studies. Field of science seems to try and figure out what’s right from the facts we have. Image of feminist science studies is more humanistic than other sciences typically are. Anne asks if science becomes more critical, will it slow down the progress of scientific studies? Maybe feminist studies is not a discipline because it does not have one problem that it is trying to solve.

Video on Dr. Quantum. The science of particles and waves. The languages Dr. Quantum uses assumes a perception. How would Barad feel about the language of physicists?

Mixture has definite properties. Multiple things that do not interfere. Superpositions are the positions in a super posed state. All of the things at once. Waves can interfere with one another. The entangled state of two particles.

What do we know versus what is real?

Epistemology: concerned with what can we know?

Ontology: concerned with what actually exists?

Difference between understanding the uncertainty (Heisenberg) is epistemology versus indeterminate-ness (Bohr) ontology claims

Einstein did not think that God would create a world that contained uncertainty. Was not willing to accept indeterminate-ness. Bohr however, was able to accept indeterminate-ness as a fact of science. Believed that quantum mechanics were formulas and that it was not ontological. 

 Quantum mechanics is a series of steps and algorithms that may not describe the real world, but matches what we can know about the world epistemically. It can be looked at as a formula. If it is looked at as a theory, it can describe how the world really is.

Indeterminate-ness of energy and time. 

How can our theories describe quantum mechanics?

Einstein did not like that there is no objectivity in observing quantum mechanics. If you can not have separability how can you have objectivity?

Bohr believes outcome is determined and repeatable. There is an objective reality that can be determined through reproducible measurements. 

Barad: the “cut” determines the boundaries and properties of the phenomenon. SHe believes that there can be an outcome that is objective, but it is dependent on the apparatus that is used to measure. Interactions versus intra-actions. Humans are embedded in the phenomenon and are co creating the physical world through being in the world. Interactions and intra actions . She contrasts “knowing as part of being, from being part of nature” vs. “knowing as a human spectator, from outside of nature.” Believes that the knower and the known are entangled.