Title: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
Author: Karen Barad
What You’ll Find in This Book
Barad’s “philosophy-physics” is part of a long and sometimes contentious debate about whether philosophy and theories prevalent in the humanities (think Michel Foucault and Judith Butler) have something to offer our understanding of what science is. From C.P. Snow first declaring that the sciences and humanities are “two cultures,” to the distrust and mockery displayed in the Sokal hoax, someone who’s not paying attention might think the conversation goes something like this:
Scientist: We use observation and rigorous testing
to establish facts about the universe. You humanists think that there’s no such
thing as truth. For you, e equals m c squared is equally
valid as e equals MC Lyte. If science
worked the way you think it does, we’d never find out anything.
Humanist: You may be good at science but you have
no idea what science actually is. Knowledge isn’t the process of objectively
culling pure truth from the universe. There is no access to reality that isn’t
by language, culture, and the mind; the history of science shows this again and
again.
(You
may have noticed that for the sake of dramatic interest, I’ve made both characters
prone to self-righteous rants. I've also made the scientist a fan of old school rap. Just because.)Barad, however, is interested in how we might be able to account for cultural, historical, and ethical realities as well as creating “faithful” stories about how the universe works; in other words, she wants a philosophy of science that doesn’t ignore all that the humanities have learned about how knowledge relates to culture and power, and to use these ideas to make scientists understand their own work well enough to make their own science more rigorous.
Barad is a physicist and also a feminist theorist, a combination you don’t find every day. As someone with political convictions, she rejects the kind of relativism that says that knowledge is always unstable and uncertain, and so there’s no way to know the moral value of something. Instead, she develops a framework called “agential realism.” This framework is based on the interconnectedness of all matter in the universe; there is no interaction among separate objects, only “intra-action” of selected pieces of a connected whole. In this view, you can be aware of how many cultural factors shape scientific inquiry, but still believe that it is possible to create better or worse (more or less scientifically accurate) accounts of how things intra-act. She even relies on Niels Bohr's thoughts on the fraught nature of scientific observation to explain this!
One of the most provocative insights in this book is that the scientific apparatus isn’t what we think it is. If you want to talk about everything that contributes to an experiment – her definition of “apparatus,” you also have to include the histories that led up to this experiment, the researchers’ conceptions, the ethical ramifications of the scientific work, etc. So if a scientist’s job is, in part, to understand and to note the apparatus used to get a particular result, then the scientist also has to understand the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of her or his work. In this view, cultural and ethical issues are therefore classified as scientific issues – as knowledge that is necessary to produce more rigorous scientific methodology.
So let's get back to our fictional scientist and humanist (you know, the self righteous ones). If Barad is taking the best of both humanists' and scientists' thoughts, does that mean that now the scientist and humanist get along? Are they cuddling on the couch now, whispering passages from Tom Stoppard in each other's ear?
No. Barad definitely wants to make it clear that she's not aiming for the spirit of compromise. She doesn't want to reconcile realism and constructivism by watering down each; she wants to create a new hybrid by radicalizing each.
Overall, the
book explains agential realism but also provides a series of fascinating applications
of this framework, from looking at working conditions to examining Michael
Frayn’s play, Copenhagen. And most of it,
believe it or not, is pretty easy to read and understand (a couple of chapters
are a little dense, but nobody says you have to read the chapters in order,
last I checked). Overall, this is one of
the most creative and interdisciplinary books on science and culture I’ve read.
Other Reasons This Book Is Badass: Barad
smacks down close-minded interpretations of science and philosophy from many
different sources, and she creates a totally new framework to think about what
science is. She’s equally adept at talking about Heisenberg
as she is about Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault. The book also includes discussion of her own
original research in physics; I’ve heard her explain at a lecture that she did
this in part so that physicists would have to buy a feminist theory book, which is pretty hilarious.
Also: You can read the wikipedia entry for more info
(Full disclosure: I wrote about half of it.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad
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