physics, degrees of belief and literature
Sparked by the Scientific American Article and Christopher Fuch's degrees of belief, I began a search for physics and literature on the web.
William Detrich has an essay on Literature and Physics. In that essay, he argues that literature tends to focus on the inner world, ignoring the outer world and asks, what does the new physics say about us? But really, we need to be asking is there such a thing as understanding or interpreting the inner world that does not require that we understand degrees of belief and I'm sure other physics concepts.
At Wheaton College, a professor teaches a course that combines both postmodern literature and physics. He states that postmodern literature is like the quantum world where everything is "episodic, disconnected, quantized into particles of insights and events. Everything is random, accidental. No one can predict how, when, where . . . " But this is not just postmodern literature. This is all literature. In some literature, the author imposes an order onto the episodic, disconnected and unpredictable world but it is always an imposition, whether the author knows or acknowledges it or not. Literature that takes these principles as a given may be unsatisfactory to many readers who seek order and predictability but it is clearly a more "real" picture of the state of affairs. But, to what extent do our brains (some of them more and some of them less) elide this disruption, smoothing it over and providing an order or a narrative, if you will, that allows us to pretend as if there is a smooth, connected and predictable world?
How is it that education got divided so tidily into fields and disciplines as if they were discrete and separate?
Is it as simple as we desire order? It's easier to teach stuff that doesn't run into other stuff? No one can be expected to know everything? Or was there a lack of understanding way back when Universities were designed that made this division make sense?
The Wheaton college course seems to be suggesting that something has changed in the last couple of decades to make our reality more slippery more "foam" like, to use his language. But nothing has changed. The physical universe is no different now then it was before. Our understanding of it has and continues to change but also for a variety of reasons disciplines are creeping into one another forcing one another to pay attention. Also, our reality spans time and place reminding us constantly of the disconnectedness of one another. And as facebook and twitter and other virtual mediums parse the self, we are starting to be faced with our own individual fractiousness and entanglement.
To the extent that this knowledge is scary, the skeptic in us rises to the occasion, frightened of the shifting universe. But the knowledge does not need to be scary--it's always been that way. In effect, nothing needs to change. Rather in understanding better the quantum realm, we should be slowly recognizing that it actually fits better with our "real" experience (though not our neatly ordered narrative one). I suppose the more neatly ordered one has created ones narrative the more scary the quantum world will seem.
William Detrich has an essay on Literature and Physics. In that essay, he argues that literature tends to focus on the inner world, ignoring the outer world and asks, what does the new physics say about us? But really, we need to be asking is there such a thing as understanding or interpreting the inner world that does not require that we understand degrees of belief and I'm sure other physics concepts.
At Wheaton College, a professor teaches a course that combines both postmodern literature and physics. He states that postmodern literature is like the quantum world where everything is "episodic, disconnected, quantized into particles of insights and events. Everything is random, accidental. No one can predict how, when, where . . . " But this is not just postmodern literature. This is all literature. In some literature, the author imposes an order onto the episodic, disconnected and unpredictable world but it is always an imposition, whether the author knows or acknowledges it or not. Literature that takes these principles as a given may be unsatisfactory to many readers who seek order and predictability but it is clearly a more "real" picture of the state of affairs. But, to what extent do our brains (some of them more and some of them less) elide this disruption, smoothing it over and providing an order or a narrative, if you will, that allows us to pretend as if there is a smooth, connected and predictable world?
How is it that education got divided so tidily into fields and disciplines as if they were discrete and separate?
Is it as simple as we desire order? It's easier to teach stuff that doesn't run into other stuff? No one can be expected to know everything? Or was there a lack of understanding way back when Universities were designed that made this division make sense?
The Wheaton college course seems to be suggesting that something has changed in the last couple of decades to make our reality more slippery more "foam" like, to use his language. But nothing has changed. The physical universe is no different now then it was before. Our understanding of it has and continues to change but also for a variety of reasons disciplines are creeping into one another forcing one another to pay attention. Also, our reality spans time and place reminding us constantly of the disconnectedness of one another. And as facebook and twitter and other virtual mediums parse the self, we are starting to be faced with our own individual fractiousness and entanglement.
To the extent that this knowledge is scary, the skeptic in us rises to the occasion, frightened of the shifting universe. But the knowledge does not need to be scary--it's always been that way. In effect, nothing needs to change. Rather in understanding better the quantum realm, we should be slowly recognizing that it actually fits better with our "real" experience (though not our neatly ordered narrative one). I suppose the more neatly ordered one has created ones narrative the more scary the quantum world will seem.
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