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Showing posts from November, 2010

re-thinking LHC and phenomenology

One of the main goals of my dissertation project is to understand the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in terms of the epistemological world it exists in, as well as its contribution towards scientific knowledge formation that grew out of a relationship between the human and the machine.  This includes understanding how data collection, generation and simulation takes place, dealing with the different stages of validation and interpretation of data, and working out the intricate relationship between the data and the apparatuses used to collect and generate them.  However, my eventual goal is to elucidate the ontological that is hidden and tightly bounded to the epistemological, which is important for understanding the foundations of all forms of knowledge and experiential structures. At the foundation of my analysis are theories of phenomenology as developed in the tradition of critical theory, which is different from the kind of phenomenology espoused by working particle physic

How working on a digital project on local history got me thinking about my work with the LHC and digitality

Yes, I am trying to build an epistemological database that will also reveal the ontological. To do that, I have to be able to effect negative information, blank spaces (which does not mean that it is empty, just that it is not visible because there is no 'textual' marker). Which theorists can I turn to for help in that? Gadamer? Foucault? Deleuze? Lacan? Fuller? Kant? Simondon? Merleau-Ponty? Bergson? Heidegger? Whitehead? Any other names I have yet to mention? But one thing that we do know is that, in order to understand epistemology, we have to understand what are categories of knowledge and how to grapple with that. To figure out what categories I would like to work with, these are some of the questions that I will have to ask myself, and I hope that the various work I am currently doing will help me deal with that. 1. How do we set the parameters for what is important knowledge over what is less important? What categories should be the root and from that ro