Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

The confluence of science fiction, cybernetics, and scientific ontology constitutes an intersection between predictions, myth-making, hypotheses, phenomenal gestures, thought-experiments and material realization. Science fiction is not a genre by which one can easily position textual productions and reproductions of scientific ideas in either sublimated or pedagogically direct forms. At the same time, the potentiality of science fiction has spurred scientists and philosophers of science to model postulations, and theoretically-produced predictions in the sciences, on its ‘narrative,’ especially in areas that are still epistemically speculative. As Godfrey-Smith suggests, model-based science is motivated by the complex nature of the scientific target and the employment of exact methods (3). Even then, as the mathematicians will tell you, the final goal is to create a general enough model, so that it can be the public key by which one can unlock the encrypted data nature has bestowed u...

The result of my summer stint at CERN and Niels Bohr has enabled me to further narrow the focus of my dissertation topic. But I am not all there yet! --------------------------------------------------------------- I am sending you and the Center for the History of Physics a short report regarding my almost 7-day stint at the Niels Bohr Library at the ACP. I was there from July 19-23, and then for a few hours on July 30 and Aug 2 respectively. I have found my stay there to be very conducive in helping me narrow down on some of the questions which I wanted to address for my dissertation. I have spent most of my time there looking at the available Archives for the Quantum History Project initiated by Thomas Kuhn and John Heilbron, as well as a book (out of the many available volumes) on the primary materials relating to and by Niels Bohr. I have visited the library in the aftermath of my two-week stint at CERN and have found it useful and tracing some of the epistemological developmen...

LIT 20: Science in Context: Imagining science through culture, gender, and art Course Description The course begins by teasing out the multiple facets of science; looking at the origin of its meaning and the multiplicity of meanings beyond what you have been taught in science classes in high school and college. We will be reading excerpts of books on the subjects of the course title, some journal articles, watch a film or two, view some documentaries and examine multimodal creations of virtual ‘labs’, electronic science ‘texts’ (which do not consist solely of words) and the technological application of the natural sciences in design, aesthetics and non-scientific work/production. We will even spend some class time discussing the meaning of the ‘non-scientific’ and discover that it is not merely the opposite of ‘science’. We will look at actual science pieces, works performing science, works playing with science, works communicating science and works theorizing science. We will have cl...