Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

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. 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 physicists and in the ‘standard models’ of philosophy of science. This phenomenology is based on Husserl’s interest in expan...

My apologies for the mess of notes at this point but I am puting them here as stimulation for further thoughts. I will be writing a separate, more coherent, post on symmetry probably early next year. --------------------------- Symmetries play an important part in modern physics for external spacetime and internal gauge symmetry structure. starting with a free theory : Dirac-Lagrangian (L D ), Noether's first theorem : conserved current, Noether's second theorem Global phase transformations are not observable In changing local operators, expectations are changed...local phase transformation is misinterpreted as empirical  Fiber bundles : rule to connect the different fibers What are the rules that allow us to go from one fiber to the next fiber Lagrangian view allows for a distinction between four groups structural realism: both quantum and gravitational gauge theories display cases of ontological underdetermination. All that exists and that can be known about...

It has been awhile since I've done any academic blogging. The end of a hectic summer also signaled the beginning of an even more hectic Fall season. No teaching or any other assistantships; just writing,writing, editing, revising, writing, making deadlines, and of course, applying for fellowships and postdocs yada yada. Now it is almost Halloween. But it is in all the writing I have been doing, and conversations I've been having, and even a book review I have to work on now, that got me thinking about how philosophy works, and specifically, how philosophy of science works in relation to science. What is it about the particular developments in 20th century, going forward, scientific thought, that has made analytic philosophy the most popular approach, at least within the academy, for thinking about the science. Yesterday, I managed to catch snippets of a web-casted talk by Arne Schirrmacher on the topic of Bohr and the development of atomic physics. One point he made that sta...