Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

 This summer may see a more active updating of this blog as I begin thinking more actively about the possible direction my dissertation would take as I will be ABD by Fall 2011. The entry below is a preliminary foray into thinking about some of the questions that came out during my exams. Of course, I have not forgotten that I promised to blog here about some of the thoughts and ideas that came up during my two-week stay in Germany. You see some of my rather haphazard notes below but I will have more to share later once this semester is over. At the moment, I am reading Edelman's Second Nature and a bunch of other stuff about brain, consciousness and the quantum world, just as an 'escape' from my usual research preoccupation(and also in fulfillment of other tasks). I will have more to say on this later. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When one thinks about the physical state, one usually view it as consisti...

Big experiments with hundreds of physicists and tens of organizations involved. The process for scientific grant application was minimal Discussion of JJ Thompson Rutherford's "discovery" of the atomic nucleus - it was considered an utter failure as nobody outside Manchester paid any attention. This was in 1911. Plagiarism in physics Quatenspringerei, anno 1913. 1928: quantum mechanics valid for the atomic nucleus Zur Quantentheorie des Atomkernes Yves G Gamow The neutron was discovered in the 1932. Chadwick thought that the elementary neutron 'had little to recommend it' The original neutron source. The Quantum Theory of the Electron by P.A.M. Dirac Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field by P.A.M. Dirac (antiparticles and magnetic monopoles) Dirac's relativistic wave equations leads formally to solutions with negative energy, which he interpreted as 'holes' in a 'sea' of negative energy electrons - and identified ...

Unlearned Mind: Scientists/Science communicator/scientist novelists

First results from Heavy Ion collisions at the LHC (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS)  I missed the first two events because I overslept (!) due to my weird sleeping habits nowadays (I can't sleep when I try to sleep earlier). But at least I caught Jurgen talking about ALICE's results. I can look at the slides for the rest (not that one can make as much sense to me without some explanation). It does seem as if they are getting the sort of results they have been looking forward to, even exceeding expectations. For ALICE as least, they've got all they want on the QGP , which is exciting. Finally they are beginning to feel like they are doing 'real physics' with actual data for 'new physics' instead of merely calibrating the tools many times over.  

This idea came to me as I was working on a project for a visual studies class that tries to use as its subject matter the history of Durham (see www.digitaldurham.duke.edu).  I worked on history of the Duke Family (because their papers are most readily accessible from the University Archives of Duke, where I go to school). But the larger idea was the excavation of 'dead' epistemology, and working through the 'dead' histories of once 'living' objects that are still connected to the living 'members' of the community through genetic and social ties got me thinking about the sort of knowledge generated before the growth in experimental particle physics, and the sorts of knowledge that have come and gone before the LHC was even built, and also the knowledge that came to pass WHEN the LHC was built (one just has to go through the large archives of materials relating to the planning, organizing and building of the LHC). I've written up extensively on this ...

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 partic...

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...