Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

Recently, I've been geeking out alot on Amazon, looking for non-library material to fill my dissertation hit list. As I receive each of these books, I'll talk about them here. What I am happy about, most recently, is that I finally found a compromise for my dissertation: I get to, somewhat, write about what interests me, while conforming to the strictures of my discipline and the dissertation. But the challenge ahead remains. Now I have to write that first chapter,  compile a bibliography (that I will add to over here), and also expand that proposal outline into a fleshy prospectus. This Monday, I found an English translation to L Mandelstamm and Ig Tamm article on "The Uncertainty Relation Between Energy and Time in Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics." It was in a bound volume of the Russian Journal of Physics that Duke Library happens to have. What brought about that interest? Well, it has to do somewhat with quantum fluctuations and semi-classical mechanics. Ye...

 I think I have to jettison this idea for now. Won't work into the dissertation time-frame...but definitely fruit for consideration post-dissertation. --------------------------- I've been thinking about the necessity of performing some sort of a science apprenticeship as a way of better understanding how science at a deep level. I don't think taking courses will help as much as attempting to work on a problem. But what problem should that be? Time to hit the archives.

In case anyone is interested, you can find my contribution to the HCP 2011 Symposium in Paris over here . It's called "Speculative Reading, Speculative Physics" :)

Over the last week, between fighting a bad cold and slumming over the various sitcoms, mysteries, and intense dramas to forget how my life suck with that cold, I took to revisiting some of the ideas I have initially toyed with in an attempt to revise the outline for my dissertation prospectus 1. Natural laws and counterfactuals: I've been reading into how physical/natural laws as produced through philosophical thought can, or not, be useful to thinking about sets, subsets and constraints when scripting the narrative of quantum reality that is the crux of my dissertation. I am probably a little skeptical of the clean lines that analytic philosophy tries to delineate when using well-known examples in classical mechanics, as well as wrt various self-referential and circular forms of logic. However, there are more to be said about laws and I may revisit this section at the later stage of my dissertation. 2. In reading two sections (I decided to skip the third section for the time b...

Being home for a day since the past 1.5 weeks of very stimulating while also exhausting excursion to Europe means that it is now time to sit back and think through all that I have learned. I have two separate conferences to follow up on, in terms of content and direction. For now, I will begin by revisiting the material from the emergent quantum theory conference, mapping out the foundational questions, then linking that to some of the science fiction material I will be reading. Then the next one will be about all the new data analysis and physics outlook stemming from the HCP conference. It is so weird to spend my Monday back in Durham instead of in an auditorium of the Pierre & Marie Curie University in Paris. More to come. Now that it is Thanksgiving weekend, I'll have plenty of time to catch up on work without driving myself to the brink.

Since last summer, and after my last posting, I have been spending much of my time tracking and defining the limits from which I want to situate my research (summer is great for that, though a big portion of my time was also taken up doing other unrelated academic activities) and also my dissertation proposal, and ultimately, my dissertation itself. The route taken has been rather long and in some sense a little unwieldy (of course, some of language limitations also make the research a lot less thorough-going than I would like), though I am beginning to make up my mind about how far and wide do I really want to go. I am going to poste some preliminary ideas that I have that will be undergoing further revisions and refinement as my research continues. Dissertation goal: Revisiting and expanding the notion of media and mediation to encompass observations and theories relating to phenomenology (in the different ways in which the term is utilized) and experiments in particle physics. The...

The experiential world we live in is structured around the micro- and macrostates. They are so tightly entwined and entangled within each other’s spatial-temporal worlds that we may find it difficult to articulate each of these states individually. Moreover, when observations are made at the micro-level, the states (quantum states) will collapse.  In addition, we tend to use the language of the macrostate to depict conditions/events at the level of the microstate because we lack the epistemic resources for navigating at this level.  Nevertheless, it is important to differentiate between these two states since that can help in understanding how and why certain theories of physics behave the way they do and why certain theories may require further fine-tuning when studied from the specificities of these two states due to issues of contradiction and conflict between the physical laws. In proposing definitions to macro- and microstates, I argue for greater finesse by dividing ...